高中英语教学译林版：Unit4Exploringliteratureextended配套阅读.docxVIP

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. Ananyo Bhattacharya, a science journalist formerly at The Economist, sets out to correct that injustice, and so fill a yawning gap in the history of science. Von Neumann belonged to a small group oAf brilliant Hungarians, of mainly Jewish backgrounds, who in the 1930s fled Nazism for America, where they were dubbed “the Martians” because of their strange language and even stranger brains. All would transform science, but von Neumann would transform daily life, and he did so in varied and profound ways. He was undoubtedly a genius, and reading this book(The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya) gives you an inkling of what that overused word really means. More than one highly intelligent acquaintance remarks that it was as if von Neumann was the only person who was really awake. The problem facing the biographer of a mathematician is that conveying mathematical concepts in mere words risks either boring the cognoscenti or bemusing the uninitiated. Rather like the books of Stephen Hawking or Carlo Rovelli, though, this one is rewarding on different levels. Everyone can grasp the significance of the puzzles posed, and if readers want to follow the genius through the steps of his solutions