The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

Paul decried that he felt like a dog that, totally exhausted, was running after a streetcar carrying his master out of sight.

By the end of May, Germany had legalized eugenic sterilization, and less than two months later, when the Nazi Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases was approved, allowing the State to render incapable of procreation by means of a surgical operation any person suffering from a hereditary disease, if the experience of medical science shows that it is highly probable that his descendants would suffer from some serious physical or mental hereditary defect, a dictum that included not only those afflicted with congenital mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s, hereditary blindness, deafness, or any other hereditary deformity, but even those who suffered from severe alcoholism,

During the first year of the law, more than sixty-four thousand people were forcibly sterilized, after being deemed unfit by Genetic Health Courts composed of a judge, a medical officer, and a medical practitioner.

he slumped down in his armchair and called out to his wife, who found him there, weeping, holding the crumpled folios where that ten-year-old had solved, with no apparent effort, questions that Gábor had labored over for months,

They said that he had learned to read by age two. That he was fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek, German, English, and French, that he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head by the time he was six, and that, during one summer, bored out of his mind after being locked in his father’s library because he had set his fencing teacher’s hair on fire, he had taught himself calculus and then committed to memory all forty-five volumes of Wilhelm Oncken’s General History. It turned out that all those things were true,

I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me.

Marina lived with me while she was young, and moved in with him when she turned sixteen, which I think greatly benefited her—she became a gifted economist and the first female officer of General Motors, she was an adviser to presidents, a director at the Council on Foreign Relations, and headed more committees and boards than I care to remember

Ever since he was a boy, Cantor had heard what he called “an unknown, secret voice” compelling him to study mathematics.

the first seven hundred and sixty-two pages of their gargantuan treatise—Principia Mathematica—were dedicated solely to proving that one plus one equals two, at which point the authors dryly note, “The above proposition is occasionally useful.”

Russell and Whitehead covered more than two thousand pages with dense notations and obscure logical schemes to try to create a consistent and complete foundation for mathematics, while von Neumann’s doctoral thesis was so concise, his set of axioms could be written down on a single sheet of paper.

Jancsi was obsessed with history—especially with the fall of ancient empires—and though his hatred for the Nazis was essentially boundless, he was also convinced that he would know exactly when to leave. I now shudder at the accuracy of some of his prognoses, prophecies that no doubt came from his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history.

Janos never worked on the foundations of mathematics again. He remained in awe of Gödel for the rest of his life. “His achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental … a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time.

soon after he met Gödel the Nazis came to power and began to persecute us, but to him that was not really a surprise, only the starkest confirmation of his total disillusionment with human decency and the ultimate proof of the sway that irrationality held over the human race.

Alan Turing almost became Jancsi’s assistant, but he decided to return to England when the war broke out.

It seems simple, but it’s crazy difficult, much, much harder than chess, and some of us became addicted. At least I did. Go has a strange charm. It takes over your mind, you start to play it in your dreams.

“This species of device is so radically new that many of its uses will become clear only after it’s been put into operation.”

Von Neumann demonstrates that you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being. You need both things: to make a copy and to endow it with the instructions needed to build itself, as well as a description of how to implement those instructions.

You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man),

To breed a successful generation of symbionts and prove that not all life comes from fierce competition, but rather through cooperation and perpetually creative symbiosis,

Reductio Ad Absurdum, that was his code name for me with his friends, one I feigned to ignore even though it cut me to the bone.

“Gods are a biological necessity,” he said to me on a particularly warm night at his home in Georgetown, during that last summer when he could still get around on crutches, “as integral to our species as language or opposable thumbs.” According to Jancsi, faith had afforded the primeval peoples of the world a source of strength, power, and meaning that modern man lacked completely;

I asked him, point-blank, how he used to be able to contemplate, with total equanimity, the killing of hundreds of millions of people in a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, and yet he could not face his own mortality with any sense of calm or dignity. “That is entirely different,” he replied.

While Lee was the only pupil living in the master’s home, he would follow almost the same training ritual as the others: wake up at dawn to study the six thousand problems contained in the manual of his dojo, passed down in unbroken tradition for over two and a half thousand years;