The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

Many of the other children felt uneasy around him. And you really can’t blame them, because he would sometimes behave as if he had been sent to school not to learn, like the rest of us, but to study and observe us.

a simple human truth that I learned very early on, which is that you can dance even with the devil knocking at your door.

Did I not know what was happening in quantum physics? It is all numbers, he said to me, these things do not behave like particles, they are not like bundles of matter or energy . . . They behave like numbers!

I told him that things had become so dark and hopeless that I could no longer imagine a future; he smiled at me and softly said that it was precisely then, in the darkest times, when one could see furthest.

Janos, meanwhile, had demonstrated the opposite: if a system was complete—if you could use it to prove every true statement—then it could never be free of contradictions, and so it would remain inconsistent!

At the heart of our theory was his proof of the so-called minimax theorem: von Neumann had mathematically demonstrated that there is always a rational course of action for two-player games, provided (and herein lies the catch) that their interests are diametrically opposed.