The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived

A novelist transforms the physicist John von Neumann into a scientific demon

- Adam Kirsch

If the most dangerous invention to emerge from World War II was the atomic bomb, the computer now seems to be running a close second, thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence. Neither the bomb nor the computer can be credited to, or blamed on, any single scientist. But if you trace the stories of these two inventions back far enough, they turn out to intersect in the figure of John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born polymath sometimes described as the smartest man who ever lived. Though he is less famous today than some of his contemporaries-Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman-many of them regarded him as the most impressive of all. Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, remarked: "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man." 

Born in Budapest in 1903, von Neumann came to the U.S. in 1930, and in 1933 he joined the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey. Like many émigré physicists, he consulted on the Manhattan Project, helping develop the implosion method used to detonate the first atomic bombs. Just weeks before Hiroshima, he also published a paper laying out a model for a programmable digital computer. When Los Alamos National Laboratory got its first computer, in 1952, it was built on the design principles known as "von Neumann architecture." The machine was jokingly christened MANIAC, and the full name followed, devised to fit the acronym: Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer.