The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

He was well liked by his friends, highly esteemed by his classmates, and appreciated by his teachers, but nothing could convince him of his self-worth.

the essence lies in recognizing connections, meanings and associations in every direction.”

Speak the truth, write with clarity, and defend it to your very end

Nelly Posthumus Meyjes,

Nelly warned her audience; it may well be that nature is utterly chaotic, with no law able to subsume the apparent heterogeneity,

he could perceive the rise of the irrational in the mindless chants of the Hitler Youth spewing over the radio waves,

Love is such a mightily divisive element.

extreme forgetfulness: at forty, he could quote back a book that he had read when he was six, word for word, but he could easily forget a friend’s or a colleague’s name, and be completely stumped by someone asking what he had for breakfast.

couldn’t stop thinking. His mind was in a state of constant hunger.

you can dance even with the devil knocking at your door.

That is how I teach, you see? Some people cannot, but I like the noise, the questions, the fights!

it took that boy just four years to obtain a degree in chemical engineering and a doctorate in mathematics.

Most mathematicians prove what they can. Von Neumann proves what he wants.

his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history.

had thought him to be Jewish, and he might have been killed were it not for his wife, Adele, a strong-willed woman whom he had met while she was working as a receptionist and dancer at a nightclub in Austria, who rescued him by attacking the bastards with the metal tip of her umbrella. “Gödel

he could not figure out if it was the nature of his work that made him unstable, or if you actually had to be unstable to think in the way that Gödel did.

Jancsi, more than anyone else I know, took

it as a most personal affront that any nation, group of people, or individual could possibly choose the base and unsophisticated philosophy of Nazism over the minds of Einstein,

many others, including, last but not least, ...

she was dying from tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Albuquerque, while I was up there in Los Alamos building an atomic bomb.

We had created a sort of mass-production system, a mathematical assembly line where each “computer”—that’s what we called people hired to do mathematical calculations—had to do a single type of operation,

It was uncanny watching these women (most of them were women) behaving like machines, operating in that strange way that computers now do.

It was perfectly rational insanity: ensuring global peace by taking us to the brink of Armageddon.

that neither the natural nor the social sciences are ever neutral,

Life is so much more than a game. Its full wealth and complexity cannot be captured by equations, no matter how beautiful or perfectly balanced.

swayed by their emotions, subject to all kinds of contradictions.

just imagine . . . All the calculations for the atom bomb were done with adding machines.

Just women and some fancy calculators.

We christened our machine the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. MANIAC, for short.

described Ivy Mike as “truly foreboding, something which marked a real change in history—a moment when the course of the world suddenly shifted from the path it had been on to a more dangerous one.

Eisenhower,

Complete destruction is the negation of peace,”

You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that. John von Neumann

an adversary of ignorance,

it was the small arguments that brought on violence, insignificant trifles that any wedded couple must contend with.

single average-sized hurricane delivers more energy than ten thousand atomic bombs.

Excessive suffering can change you in many ways. The

the interests of humanity might one day change, the present curiosity in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind.

For progress there is no cure.”