The Maniac

Books

From one of literature's most exciting new voices, a story centered around one of the great geniuses of the modern age, the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the uncanny circuit of his mind deep into our own time's most haunting dilemmas. Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took modern science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a masterpiece on an even more epic scale, with the protean figure of John von Neumann in its foreground. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people that surrounded him from his early school days until the end of his life, von Neumann transformed every field he touched, essentially inventing the game theory, the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular ...