fictional story about the history of John von Neumann, seen/heard from different people, his various wives, friends, colleagues.
Intriguing, both for its historical content as well as the various tones.
The direction in which theoretical physics was heading went completely against [Paul Ehrenfest's] grain: real, physical intuition was being replaced with brute-force artillery, and mathematical formulae were set in place of matter, atoms, and energy. Paul detested the likes of John van Neumann, that Hungarian wunderkind, with his "terrifying mathematical guns and unreadably complicated formula apparatus," as much as he despised the indigestion that the "infinite Heisenberg-Born-Dirac-Schrödinger sausage-machine factory" caused him.
It may well be that nature is utterly chaotic, with no law able to subsume the apparent, heterogeneity, no concept capable of whittling down its ever-increasing complexity. What if nature cannot be cognized as a whole?
I never loved him for his brains. That was that mad-woman's Klari mistake. I married Johnny because, idiot that he was, he made me laugh, and we remained in lust during our entire lives, even if that drove our spouses crazy. But I could not have stayed married to that man. Ay, yes, the great von Neumann. What a mensch! God of science and technology! King of consultants! Father of computers! Makes me laugh. If they only knew him like I did. That man could not tie his shoes. Useless. Worse than a baby. I swear that if I had left him home by himself for a couple of days he would have starved in front of the stove.
Both Plato and Aristotle abhorred the notion of infinity, and that was pretty much the state of things among mathematicians until Cantor came along at the end of the nineteenth century and showed us that there was not just one type of infinity, but a great variety of them. Cantor's thesis threw the whole of mathematics into pandemonium, as his enormously expanded theoretical landscape-where each new infinity seemed to be vaster than anything we had known before-was teeming with dangerous, self-contradictory notions, and logical absurdities that appeared to have sprung from some mad god's deranged imagination. By using his new ideas, Cantor could apparently demonstrate that there were as many points in a one-inch line as there were in all of space. He had taken a giant leap into the unknown and found something unique, something that nobody had ever considered before him.
In 1901, Bertrand Russell, one of Europe's foremost logicians, discovered a fatal paradox in set theory, and it became a veritable obsession for him. It would not let him rest, even when he was sound asleep, because he would dream of it, again and again.
[Gábor Szegó] I did not teach him what the "pure" in "pure mathematics" really means. It is not what people think. It is not knowledge for its own sake. it is not a search for patterns, nor is it a series of abstract, intellectual games completely unconnected from the real world and its many troubles. It is sometimes quite other. Mathematics is the closest we can come to the mind of Hashem. And so, it should be practiced with reverence, because it has true power, a power that can be easily used for evil, as it is born from a faculty that only we possess, and that the Lord, blessed be He, gave us instead of teeth, claws, or talons, but that is equally dangerous and lethal. Of this, I taught him nothing. Whatever judgment awaits me, I cannot deny that I saw it before anyone else. What he could do. It was so rare and beautiful that to watch him was to weep. Yes, I saw that, but I also saw something else. I sinister, machinelike intelligence that lacked the restraints that bind the rest of us. Why did I remain silent, then? Because he was so superior. To me, to all of us. I felt slightly ashamed in his presence. Belittled and debased.
Yes, it was terrible, but no major battles were fought inside our country. Hungary was the breadbasket for Austria-Hungary, and wartime shortages boosted wheat prices so much that the rich actually became richer. So many of us acted as if nothing was happening. This might seem shocking, I know, but it taught me a simple human truth that I learned very early on, which is that you can dance even with the devil knocking at your door.
