John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More [Hardcover]

Norman MacRae (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0821820648 | ISBN-13: 978-0821820643 | Publication Date: November 5, 1999

This volume is the reprinted edition of the first full-scale biography of the man widely regarded as the greatest scientist of the century after Einstein. <P>Born in Budapest in 1903, John von Neumann grew up in one of the most extraordinary of scientific communities. From his arrival in America in the mid-1930s--with bases in Boston, Princeton, Washington, and Los Alamos--von Neumann pioneered and participated in the major scientific and political dramas of the next three decades, leaving his mark on more fields of scientific endeavor than any other scientist. Von Neumann's work in areas such as game theory, mathematics, physics, and meteorology formed the building blocks for the most important discoveries of the century: the modern computer, game theory, the atom bomb, radar, and artificial intelligence, to name just a few. <P>From the laboratory to the highest levels of government, this definitive biography gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the politics and personalities involved in these world-changing discoveries. Written more than 30 years after von Neumann's untimely death at age 54, it was prepared with the cooperation of his family and includes information gained from interviewing countless sources across Europe and America. Norman Macrae paints a highly readable, humanizing portrait of a man whose legacy still influences and shapes modern science and knowledge.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Provides a nice and fascinating picture of a genius who was active in so many domains." ---- Zentralblatt MATH

"The American Mathematical Society should be congratulated for republishing the 1992 Pantheon Books biography about "Johnny" von Neumann. Biographer Macrae takes a "viewspaperman" approach which stresses the context and personalities associated with von Neumann's remarkable life, rather than attempting to give a detailed scholarly analysis of von Neumann's papers. The resulting book is a highly entertaining account that is difficult to put down." ---- Journal of Mathematical Psychology

"A full and intimate biography of 'the man who consciously and deliberately set mankind moving along the road that led us into the Age of Computers'." ---- Freeman Dyson, Princeton, NJ --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 405 pages
• Publisher: Amer Mathematical Society (November 5, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821820648
• ISBN-13: 978-0821820643
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,063,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

115 of 125 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Save your money, April 2, 2000

By 

Mark K. Yasuda - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More (Hardcover)

Easily the worst scientific biography I've ever read. All themore pity, as John Von Neumann is a genuinely fascinating subject forstudy. Regrettably, MacRae is completely unqualified for the task of writing a biography on Von Neumann. By his own admission (page 138), he last took a course in high school mathematics around the age of 15 and it shows throughout the book (witness his ridiculous illustration of a Hilbert Space on pages 138-139). He also possesses no understanding of physics (for example, on page 131, he's characterizing general relativity as the theory "which explained the odd things that happen when something moves at near the speed of light" and on page 301 he lists quantum mechanics among subjects in which "simple linear equations had ruled"). Even in economics, which is his supposed specialty, he cannot provide any original insights. The first example he uses for game theory is well known - he lifts the Morra example from Bronowski's "Ascent of Man" without modification, and essentially lifts another example from another textbook. With his very limited background, MacRae can offer no real perspective on Von Neumann's works, and so he patches together quotes from other sources to do the job for him.

MacRae's lack of qualifications aren't by themselves a reason to avoid this book, as a suitably well footnoted synthesis of source material coupled with relevant interviews would have provided a certain amount of value. Unfortunately, there are no footnotes (just a bibliography) and most of the source material which MacRae does use is already readily accessible in less flawed and better written books. Furthermore, MacRae is so endlessly repetitive in several of his characterizations of Von Neumann, that it becomes downright nauseating. MacRae also performs a great disservice in deifying his subject by greatly overstating his influence and excusing any anecdotal flaws. Von Neumann was a great enough scientist that he doesn't need MaCrae's effusive and misleading depictions. One more warning: there is only one photograph in the entire book, besides the cover itself.

By far the biggest problem, however, comes from MacRae's approach to the book - he insists upon inserting so much of his own world views and dogma into the body of the book, that we no longer have a biography on Von Neumann - we have Von Neumann's life used as a vehicle for MacRae's own personal views on education, politics, the Japanese economy of the 1960's through the 1980's (I never expected to see this in a Von Neumann biography), and cold war history. He takes time out to provide slanted views of Bertrand Russell and Norbert Wiener, for no reason (they barely figure in the book beyond his distorted descriptions of them) other than to insinuate that their liberal viewpoints are due to poor parenting. In sum, the book's most fatal flaw is that there's entirely too much of MacRae, and not enough Von Neumann.

29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The worldly secrets of John von Neumann, May 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More (Hardcover)

It seems that as time passes and nuclear secrets are gradually declassified, we get longer and longer biographies of John von Neumann. MacRae's biography is helpful, partly because it is fairly recent, and partly because MacRae gives us a glimpse of the worldly side of John von Neumann. The book captures his social style, his special expertise at bluffing, his sense of academic showmanship, his political power -- and shows how adroitly he used that power and his own mystique to push through his technical insights and decisions.

Von Neumann was a trained chemical engineer. Although chemistry is usually remarked as the slightest of his credentials, he knew it and used it. This book includes the story of how he applied mathematics and chemistry to the development, delivery and control of explosive weapons - first chemical, and then nuclear.

Von Neumann's work on explosives is a common thread that runs through his work and pulls together many of his interests that - seen in isolation - seem amazingly disparate. His interests in computers, aerodynamics, parlour game theory and even meteorology were all rooted in or entrained by his fascination with explosive weapons. (For a thermonuclear weapon, for example, the weather is a delivery system for fallout.)

In 1938, von Neumann first became a consultant to the United States military, working at the Aberdeen proving grounds in Maryland. He began by improving the aim of very large guns with explosive shells. It was a surprisingly complicated business because it involved winds aloft, turbulent flow, impacts, and expanding shock fronts of explosive charges. It was on one of his frequent trips to Aberdeen that he encountered one of the University of Pennsylvania engineers working on ENIAC. Von Neumann was unsatisfied with the analog computers then used for weapons work, and plunged into the problem of improving the nascent digital machine. Ultimately he created a digital computer at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. His purpose in building this particular machine was to use it to complete the design of the hydrogen bomb.

After the war began, von Neumann was sent to England to study the damage inflicted by German bombs during the blitz. He noticed the German bombs were not completely effective because they buried themselves before exploding. Von Neumann used this insight to invent the "air burst" explosive. Thereafter, allied bombs worldwide were fused to go off before they hit the ground. The technique vastly improved their destructive power. Hiroshima was an air burst. At Nagasaki, the bomb was an implosion weapon characterized at Los Alamos as "von Neumann's bomb" because of the implosive detonator he helped develop for it.

MacRae evidently admires von Neumann's accomplishments as a weaponeer, and as a political advocate of weapons development, but he does not quite convey von Neumann's personal sophistication and sense of scientific inquiry.

For example, in developing the digital computer von Neumann talked to a number of neurobiologists. For the most part he believed what they told him and adapted whatever he found useful. His Silliman lectures, reprinted as his book on The Computer and The Brain, includes his credulous precis on the neurobiology of the early 1950s. But von Neumann also noticed and questioned something few neurophysiologists bother themselves about - then or now - which is the fact that the retinal cells of the eye look backward. They are pointed toward the back wall of the eye, and not out at the world. Perhaps these cells see there a thin film diffraction pattern, and not the literal visual picture our brain shows us as an image of the world. Also, in a book by the editor of The Economist, one might expect a bit more on von Neumanns contributions to economics.

Withal, it is difficult to understand why such a civilized, curious, well spoken, socially adroit and erudite man was so intrigued by explosives. To try to make sense of von Neumann you can also read several other books - there exists no single coherent biography. Find "von Neumann and Weiner," two half-biographies in one volume by Heims; The superb Prisoner's Dilemma, by Poundstone; and for historical context, the Rhodes books on the making of the Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs.

After von Neumann's death, his concepts of strategic games were highly elaborated at the RAND corporation, and ultimately became U.S. nuclear policy. MacRae touches on this legacy, but the best book on this great chunk of obscured American history is The Wizards of Armageddon, by Kaplan. It would be interesting to know if von Neumann's theory of parlour games was also used to formulate strategic policy for the Viet Nam disaster. It would not be surprising.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good biography of a true genius, June 21, 2006

By 

lector avidus (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More (Paperback)

John von Neumann was a prodigy's prodigy, the likes of whom rarely grace the earth. Norman McRae is one of the few intrepid biographers who have dared to take on von Neumann's phenomenally accomplished life. As was to be expected, McRae wasn't equal to his subject, but the book is still extremely worthwhile.

I wished that McRae had put more effort into describing the science of von Neuman's work - Aspray did an excellent job in describing his contributions to computer science - and spared us some his thoughts on the Japanese economy. Nevertheless, this is a good, if imperfect book, and one of the best on John von Neumann.