Benjamín Labatut - The Maniac (Pushkin Press, 2023) ****½

It's impressive to write a brilliant first novel, as Benjamin Labatut did with "When We Cease To Understand The World", but to deliver a sophomore novel with the same power as the first one is exceptional. 

That is the case with "The Maniac", a fictionalised biography of the great 20th Century mathematician John Von Neumann. 

But the book starts with a short story about Paul Ehrenfest, the theoretical physicist, who shot his son and committed suicide afterwards. Despite all his successes, Ehrenfest considered himself a complete failure in all aspects of his life, and was severely depressed, which was even more accentuated by the rise of fascism in Germany. Gripping and precise ... a good warming-up for the rest of the novel. 

Yet the real bulk of the book is about John von Neumann, the Hungarian polymath who was probably one of the smartest men who ever lived. He brought significant changes in the field of mathematics, invented game theory in economics, and designed the mathematical work for quantum physics, as well as computer programming, weather programming and other complex systems. He left Europe to work on the Manhattan Project in the United States, primarily on the calculations to design the hydrogen bomb. But Labatut's work is more than just a description of von Neumann's life. He brings him to life in a whole list of short chapters, each with their own style and format, written or told by the people close to him: friends, family members, colleagues, rivals. It is the story of a man who was not only gifted with a great mind, but who also went beyond the boundaries of what people thought was thinkable. He saw possibilities, patterns and future solutions beyond the realm of human rationality and thought. 

Here are two examples to illustrate the differences in styles and narratives: 

By Eugene Wigner - a former schoolmate, and a Noble Prize winner in physics: 

"His (von Neumann's) intelligence was playful, not tortured, and his insights were usually immediate, prac­tically instantaneous, not labored. But Gödel had broken something in him, so he locked himself up and Mariette would hear him scream in six different languages. When he finally emerged in late November, sporting a patchy beard that she would later make fun of whenever she wanted to humiliate him, he walked straight to the post office to send a letter to Gödel, informing him that he had developed an even more remarkable corollary to his already outstanding theorem: "Using the methods you employed so successfully ... I achieved a result that seems to me to be remarkable; namely, I was able to show that the consistency of mathematics is unprovable." Jancsi (von Neumann) had basically turned Gödel's argument on its head. According to the Austrian, if a system was consistent - free from contradictions - then it would be incomplete, be­cause it would contain verities that could not be proven. Janos, mean­while, had demonstrated the opposite: if a system was complete - if you could use it to prove every true statement - then it could never be free of contradictions, and so it would remain inconsistent! An incomplete system was not satisfactory, for obvious reasons, but an inconsistent one was much worse, because with it you could prove anything you liked: the wildest imaginable conjecture and its opposite, an impossible state­ment and the negation of that impossibility. When you combined Gödel's and von Neumann's ideas, the outcome defied logic itself: from here to eternity, mathematicians would have to choose between accepting ter­rible paradoxes and contradictions, or work with unverifiable truths. It was an almost intolerable dilemma, but there appeared to be no way around it. Gödel's logic, however mysterious, was airtight." (p.97)

Julian Bigelow - with whom von Neumann co-created their first computer

"Our funding came mostly from the military. 

Johnny had hooked them by explaining the possibilities that acceler­ating computation by a factor of ten thousand would open up. 

I mean, just imagine ... 

All the calculations for the atom bomb were done with adding ma­chines.

No real computers at all. 

Just women and some fancy calculators.

So those war boys were salivating even before we finished.

They were dreaming big and deadly.

But Johnny was thinking bigger. He was considering problems that were completely unassailable at the time. 

He wanted to mathematize everything. 

To spark revolutions in biology, economics, neurology, and cos­mology. 

To transform all areas of human thought and grab science by the throat by unleashing the power of unlimited computation. 

That's why he built his machine. 

"This species of device is so radically new that many of its uses will become clear only after it's been put into operation." 

It's what he said to me. 'Cause he understood. (p. 158)

Sidney Brenner - Biologist and Nobel Prize winner in physiology in 2002

"No one I knew had ever heard of it, and I'm not really sure how it ended up in my hands, but what he does in that paper is something extraordinary: he managed to determine the logical rules behind all modes of self-replication, whether biological, mechanical, or digital. It's so terribly obscure that it's no wonder it went ignored and unnoticed at first. Or perhaps it is just one of those things that are too alien to be easily recognized, ideas that require science and technology to mature and develop to a point when they can finally fall to Earth and ripen. Von Neumann demonstrates that you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being. You need both things: to make a copy and to endow it with the instructions needed to build itself,· as well as a description of how to implement those instructions. In his paper, he divided his theoretical construct-which he called the "automaton"-into three components: the functional part, a decoder that reads the instructions and builds the next copy, and a device that takes that information and inserts it into the new machine. The astounding thing is that right there, in that pa­per written in the late 1940s, he depicts the way in which DNA and RNA work, long before anyone had ever glimpsed the strange beauty of the double helix. The logical basis of all systems of self-replication is made so crystal clear by von Neumann that I can't believe I wasn't able to figure it out myself. I would have become an instant celebrity! But I simply wasn't smart enough, I didn't understand how you could apply his immaculate mathematical concepts to the messy world of biology. It took years for his concepts to slowly worm their way into my own work. In my defense, it's still hard to fathom how he arrived at his ideas, be­cause he did so not by studying actual living, breathing life-forms made of flesh and blood, but by dreaming up a theoretical entity that could self-replicate, a creature unlike anything that exists, at least as far as we know". (p.189)

The third story in the book is about the creation of DeepMind, its creators and the trial of this artificial intelligence in the game of Go. We get both the perspectives of Demis Hassabis, the brilliant young man who co-developed DeepMind and of Lee Sedol, the Korean Go prodigy who eventually got beatten by AlphaGo, the computer programme designed by DeepMind. The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10¹⁷⁰, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, estimated to be of the order of 10^80. 

"But what truly bothered him was not his own remarkable mind, but all the minds that surrounded him, how­ever limited in comparison. Why had evolution built us this way? Why were we burdened by consciousness, when we could have remained blissfully ignorant like-all other life-forms on this planet, living and dy­ing with such an Edenic lack of awareness that pain and pleasure were only ever felt in the present, and did not, like our pains and glories, stretch out from one day to the next, linking us all together in an end­less chain of suffering? He had read enough books to know that in thou­sands of years of civilization, we had not moved an inch closer to understanding any of this. Consciousness remained an unsolvable puz­zle, a dilemma that pointed toward the limits beyond which mankind may never tread. Demis could have accepted it were it not for the fact that, while it was true that mankind had managed to survive thus far without any semblance of true understanding, the future was now bleak, dark, and getting darker, as science-the crown jewel of our species­was so rapidly progressing that it would soon drive us off the edge, into a world for which we were woefully unprepared. It did not take a genius to realize that scientific breakthroughs were transfor_ming every aspect of our lives, while leaving the most fundamental questions unanswered. Soon we would reach a breaking point. Our monkey brains had taken us as far as they could. Something radically new was needed. A differ­ent type of mind, one that could see past us, far beyond the shadows cast by our own eyes. There was no longer any time to waste playing childish, zero-sum games." (p. 290)

Like the other stories, the personal angle, the impact on the emotions of the characters, their isolation, uniqueness, near to madness level of genius, or the single-minded perfection of their work, the defeat in the game, the loss of pride, and loss of perspective, are the true wonders of Labatut's writing. It is not about the science, it is about the scientists, about human endeavour, about excellence, about going where no one has gone before just by the power of mind. The use of fiction makes this much more fascinating because it allows to give different perspectives, to play with form, to use a lot of qualifying adjectives, to describe the inner struggles that could never come to the surface in a real biography, in which description and facts would dominate. Labatut turns a biography into a perfectly balanced, captivating and entertaining symphony. 

By the way, the title MANIAC stands for the original name of Von Neumann's computer: the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. 

Highly recommended!