“Call me Johnny” would be the extrovert words that greeted guests at his lavish parties, social events that seemed to be completely at odds with our expectations of how a genius mathematician should behave. In fact, one of the reasons Neumann János Lajos – John von Neumann – is such an endlessly fascinating subject for the modern biographer (as well as the reader of so-called works of popular science), is that contrast.
Apart from being one of the finest minds of the 20th century, von Neumann was also idiosyncratic and entertaining. For any commentator, the challenge is always one of painting the dual portrait of visionary thinker and eccentric professor stereotype with credible balance. In ‘The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann’ (Allen Lane, £20 ISBN 9780241398852), Ananyo Bhattacharya does just that, guiding us through the ideas that built the modern world while making sense of the man behind them: an aristocratic Hungarian...