John von Neumann with MANIAC, the primary pc to be based mostly on his structure
PhotoQuest/Getty Pictures
The MANIAC
Benjamín Labatut (Pushkin Press)
IT IS a curious and morbid proven fact that a few of the twentieth century’s most proficient scientists died by suicide or skilled psychological breakdowns so extreme that they needed to go away their fields altogether. One usually quoted physics textbook, States of Matter by David L. Goodstein, opens with these sentences: “Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent a lot of his life learning statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his personal hand. Paul Ehrenfest, …