The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann

More of an account of the times he lived in, a very simplified details of the great things he did. Fine by me, this the kind of autobiography I love. Impressive guy.

Von Neumann was arguably one the most intelligent people who ever lived but somehow has been forgotten outside of the scientifically active community. This book tries to bring out his phenomenal achievements. What makes this book particularly appealing is that it does not limit itself to be a dreary biography of the man himself but goes into the context and shows the contributions of others and brings forth a lost of historical perspective. The other thing is that it does not flinch from some fair amount of detail explaining topics as varied as Hilbert spaces, prisoner's dilemna and computer architectures to a non-technical audience.So an excellent book. A couple of comments worth mentioning however. The book goes into a fair amount of detail on mathematical and scientific topics. Whilst it does so for a general audience and is for the most part extremely lucid not everyone may be up for the level of detail and so I would advice them to read the book at a dynamic pace - speeding up and slowing down as per interest - but do not skip the content completely.Second I think the chapter on cellular automata sort of diverted away from Von Neumann. It is true that he was one of the founding fathers of the discipline but much work was done on it after this death but so can be said about computing. This chapter however goes a lot too much in my opinion into post-Neumann developments. Second, although by no means an expert on the topic, I felt cellular automata was given more importance in the book than it is due in terms of its achievements till date.Except the above, the book is excellent and strongly recommended.