Book Recommendation: The MANIAC

I write in this post about the book The MANIAC I have recently finished reading and highly recommend.

About

I have recently finished The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75665931-the-maniac and I highly recommend it.

I have heard about it in the Répliques Podcast épisode by Alain Finkielkraut "La folie mathématique" https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/repliques/la-folie-mathematique-3543797

Also, the book was picked by Barack Obama in his 2023 best read list (Goodreads List).

(I got it on amazon.de for 1.50€ in English version)

Review

I would give the book a 4.5 stars rating.

The book was originally written in English.

I really liked that at each chapter a real-life character/legend is writing, like Richard Feynman, Eugene Wigner, ....

These are fiction texts but very realistic.

The book is divided in three parts about Paul Ehrenfest, John von Neumann, and Lee Sedol the best Go Player, who got beaten by AlphaGo.

This about the rise of the computer and artificial intelligence.

The MANIAC was the computer created by von Neumann and used for the atomic bomb calculations. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I

See Wikipedia entry about the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_MANIAC 

I have learned about Paul Ehrenfest (didn't know he committed suicide after killing his son), about Go (looks very complex much more than chess), that von Neumann was such a genius (much more than other Nobel price winners).