BROADCASTS.com

b'

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future

John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn\\u2019t previously heard of, like \\u201coperator algebras\\u201d, \\u201ccontinuous geometry\\u201d, and \\u201cergodic theory\\u201d.

The Man From The Future, by Ananyo Bhattacharya, touches on all these things. But you don\\u2019t read a von Neumann biography to learn more about the invention of ergodic theory. You read it to gawk at an extreme human specimen, maybe the smartest man who ever lived.

By age 6, he could multiply eight-digit numbers in his head. At the same age, he spoke conversational ancient Greek; later, he would add Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish (sometimes joked about also speaking Spanish, but he would just put "el" before English words and add -o to the end) . Rumor had it he memorized everything he ever read. A fellow mathematician once tried to test this by asking him to recite Tale Of Two Cities, and reported that \\u201che immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes\\u201d.