The Man From The Future, by Ananyo Bhattacharya

A pleasant skip through ~5 academic disciplines which are united by the fact that John von Neumann was interested in them.

People will tell you this is a biography of JvN. It is not a biography of JvN. The author did not have access to anyone with anything interesting to say about JvN -- it seems possible the only person the author spoke to in person was JvNs daughter, who did not have anything interesting to say, and that all the other records were from reading other things.

I will eventually try to write a proper magazine article about this process by which 1) authors pitch a biography to their agents and then publishers, 2) get the advance to write it, 3) fail to secure the interviews they needed/wanted, then 4) finally write a book that is either vapid or actively distorts history based on the few sources they were able to talk to. It is a horrorshow. I will eventually demand that authors pre-register the interviews they hope to get for their books, and then which ones they actually secured, so that when they write these lopsided monstrosities it will be clear to everyone that they wanted to write a different book, couldn't secure the interviews they needed for it, and were desperately filling pages.

A friend sent me a review of this current book that says:

[Bhattacharya] is at least as interested in giving us a tour of early 20th century mathematics, framed by the life of its most brilliant practitioner. The book devotes more pages to set theory than to von Neumann’s childhood, and spends more time on von Neumann’s formalization of quantum mechanics than on his first marriage (to be fair, so did von Neumann - hence the divorce)

My friend, I do not think this is what happened here. I mean, it's a fun/funny idea: the author wanted to write a book about the highlights of 20th century mathematics, and knew it would be an easier sell if he tied it together through the life of JvN, so he used the biography format as a hook for the book he'd always really wanted to write.

But I do not think that happened here. I think he couldn't get good material on JvN, and so wrote about what he could write about, which was.... various topics in mathematics.