Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War

(instrumental music plays) I try to lay out the context of this. I mean, this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known. Millions of people had died. And von Neumann had predicted this, um, the Holocaust very s- you know, successfully years in advance. And he now was convinced that within a decade, there would be a third world war with nuclear weapons.

Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Ananyo Bhattacharyah, who is a science writer, who has worked at the Economist and at, uh, Nature, and most recently, he's the author of The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, and it was a extremely enjoyable read, super interesting. And so, before we jump into the questions, Aananyo, I'm wondering if you can kind of give context to my audience and summarize the life of this giant.

(laughs) Uh, well, that's not an easy task, but I'll give it a go. So he was, um, born in Budapest, uh, in around 1903 to this wealthy Jewish family, and pretty early on, um, they realized that, um, there's something quite special about him. So he can do these long six-figure calculations in his head by six, and he's learnt calculus by eight, right? And he's teaching himself the finer points of set theory, um, by kind of 11, right? So he's going on long walks with, uh, Eugene Wigner, who was a childhood friend of his and a future Nobel Prize winner, and, uh, Wigner's a year older than him, and he's, he's teaching Wigner set theory at that age. So it's, it's kind of clear that even among geniuses, as he would be later on at, uh, Los Alamos, for example, or, um, at the, uh, Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced Study, uh, where he'd be recruited along with Einstein, that he was kind of, um, a cut above even all of these, uh, incredibly clever people. And, uh... And so yeah, so he grows up in this, uh, quite privileged Budapest surroundings. Um, their home was, um, often visited by, um, the, the greats of the time, um, it was an incredibly cultured city, and, um, his, um, father, Max, was a kind of successful banker, so they were quite wealthy. I mean, he was a self-made man. Um, but, um, he had, as a result, von Neumann, who was one of, uh, three brothers, actually, he was the eldest, he had the benefits of, um, kind of a top flight education as well.

Yeah. So, you know, um, w- right before we did the interview, I was c- thinking about what... Uh, you know, I have a computer science degree, and I was thinking about, okay, what portion of my computer science degree can be traced back directly to von Neumann? I was go- just going through just like an initial glance at a few of the classes that I took where, like, a large part of the fraction of the content, uh, came from von Neumann, right? So you could like... Okay. Algorithms, linear programming, um, you know, merge sort, li- like, probably like a quarter of my curriculum. Um, quantum computing, uh, you know, density, and density matrix, uh, von Neumann entropy. Hardware, von Neumann, uh, the, uh, you know, the von Neumann architecture for my, uh, the computers. Um, you know, e- even like in my organizational ethics class, you know, that, that, that game theory, um, th- that comes up. Uh, you know, theory of computing, uh, you know, finite state machines, um, cellular automata. So, like, I, uh, it's astounding to me that this person is responsible for probably like a third of everything I learned in college. Um, and so it was, uh, it was, um, very interesting to then get to read the history of this person and the ideas that he came up with and interacted with. Um, a- and now, uh, o- one very interesting part about the context, um, uh, context surrounding von Neumann's work is, you know, he was part of this group, as you talk about, called the Martians. They were, uh, Hungarian and Central European Jews who migrated to the United States in the early 20th century, and w- um, as Scott Alexander has a fun blog post title about this, he says, uh, the, um, the, the (hand clap) nuclear, uh, the, the nuclear bomb was a high school science project for a bunch of, uh, Hungarians, uh, because the, uh, eh, a- a lot of the scientists who worked on the, uh, n- nuclear bomb were par- uh, like, went to the same high school. So what was the cultural or other factors that made this group of people so... I mean, uh, produce so many geniuses?