Man from Future

In 1945, while in a state of exhaustion , the mathematician John von Neumann had a kind of stammering premonition. He was in Los Alamos, working on the atom bomb, and he told his wife Klari that the "energy source" he was helping to develop would make scientists "the most hated and also the most wanted citizens of any country". Then he informed her that his other ongoing project, the computer, would one day be even more important-and potentially even more dangerous. Good biographies of some of the greatest mathematical minds are rare: because they were polymaths, biographers who can interpret their manifold achievements for the ordinary mortal are themselves thin on the ground. This has been von Neumann's fate, and the upshot is that he has not had the recognition he deserves.