2022 in books: #7, The Man From the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya
Hello! Feel free to skip this italicised section if you’ve read any of my other 2022 wrap up blogs!
A little bit of background: since the 6th grade (14 years ago!) I have had a personal mission I call “The Million Page Project.” This has taken the shape of paper logs, excel sheets, blogs, websites and most recently — an increasingly active twitter handle that talks sporadically about books and incessantly about all my other random thoughts.
The goal is to read a million pages before I die. Why? Because my 6th grade teacher set a challenge to the school to collectively read a million pages in a year and I — knowing nothing about scale — was like hmm, I could probably do that alone?
The number I’ve gotten to so far is 163,480 pages or 454 books (as of Dec 22) for anyone who’s wondering. But to be more honest, it’s not about the number — it’s just a way for me to do something I love and catalogue it. As I read, I try to review the books in my own sprawling way to capture how it made me feel, and that’s what I’ll be sharing here. It’ll have spoilers, no coherent summary of plot and often the character names will be missing. But what it will have is a whole lot of heart!
My 7th recommendation this year: The Man From the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya
I found this book on a visit to Champaca where it took me 7–8 rounds (more than an hour!) of the shelves to pick a book — so it felt really hard won. Recently I’ve found this to be increasingly the case — earlier, it would take me maybe 15–20 minutes to find a book — probably because I was willing to read pretty much anything.
Beginning of 2022, maybe it would take me about 30 minutes to an hour — because lately style has become fairly important to me, especially as I read a lot more fiction again.
But the second half of the year, as festival season geared up and life got super busy? I’ve found it nearly impossible to find good books, taking weeks at a time to find my next read sometimes. It’s now a function of style + content + mood — which really complicates things. Even this book, I picked up in resignation — I simply could not leave empty handed after spending so much time browsing; plus I wanted to drink coffee and I can’t imagine ordering a beverage but not buying a book at a bookstore.
But I’m so glad I did pick this up! It hasn’t been a big non-fiction year for me — better than last year, but nothing compared to the ratios I used to do earlier. I’m not too worried about this — I read for pleasure primarily — but this book reinforced what I often forget: how much joy non-fiction reading contains too.
The book is about John von Neumann, a Hungarian-American mathematician who revolutionised the field of mathematics, computing and many others.
I was actually quite familiar with Neumann already — I feel like I’ve been seeing his name for years. Not just about the Manhattan Project or in my Mathematics of Computation classes but across departments. Think Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ to climate change — to my Stata ‘How to’ guide.
Which is to give you at a broad level an understanding of his impact and the breadth of his intellect — but to get a real sense of it, there’s no alternative to reading this book. So what I’m here to talk about instead is the genius of Ananyo Bhattacharya in writing this book. To do that, I first need to talk about a different mind I’ve been lucky enough to encounter.
I took a class by Keith Schwarz called CS103 during my time at Stanford (sophomore/junior year I think?) — and it was amongst the very best classes I took. It was titled ‘The Mathematical Foundations of Computing’ — the description is about ‘Logic, Automata, and Complexity’ I believe, though to be honest, that’s not what it is. What the class is about is about how to use formal mathematical language — and I cannot tell you how much more exciting that is. It’s a difficult class — don’t get me wrong, it’s actually quite notorious for that. But it was such a joy!
Keith is a master storyteller — you’d sit down as class started and till it ended, one and a half hours later, you wouldn’t have a second to think about anything but what he was revealing to you — which was the story, the beauty and the experience of formal mathematical reasoning.
It felt like knowledge received from the fabric of the universe — which is to say he made it poetic, profound and exciting. Whether we were talking about Cantor or combinatorics or set theory, you really felt like the world was at stake and that everything in the world could be explained, if only Keith was doing it with a brilliant PPT projected behind him.
You encounter a lot of brilliant minds in life — I’ve been lucky to experience a few in person. Keith is easily in the top 5 — being in his presence was to be in awe. It’s not only his ability to think with rigour or to outpace everyone around him — it’s his ability to do these things and yet communicate these insights so effectively — which to me, always means with beauty. And Keith’s brand of genius — it’s expansive. It doesn’t make you feel left behind or jealous — it fills you with awe that this too is possible with the human mind.
I talk about Keith here because 1) this book talked about so many of the concepts we covered in that class and 2) because Bhattacharya did with this narrative what Keith did with his class — he made the making of mathematics — the real human process of how the defining theories are arrived at — come alive. It feels like sports commentary — the sense of urgency, excitement and movement that he infuses into his writing — and it mirrors what I’ve seen in the best mathematical minds when they speak about these ideas.
In school, you’re taught mathematics like it’s a done deal. A perfect information game, a dead thing — set in stone. You’re not taught to play with it, to test its limits — like something still being forged. But it is! And that’s what Bhattacharya is able to communicate — not just the amazing life of one man, but in the history he writes, the story of many minds working together with the ambition of understanding this world.
I actually first learnt formal mathematical language quite early — when I went to Brown for summer school as a highschooler and took a course called “Logic and Paradox.” I immediately fell in love — our professor (who’s name I can’t remember because my memory is awful!) was amazing and really showed us the beauty in translating messy propositions into clean, elegant notation. I think this way of seeing the world is so uniquely human and that fact that most people will never experience it or see it as the boring fodder of stuffy mathematicians is such a waste!
I remember when I was in 3/4th grade, I asked Yeshu what she was learning in maths one day when we were driving to school. And she told me algebra, which meant someone gave you clues and then you had to discover a number. And I remember being so excited!
Having completely misunderstood what algebra in school actually meant, I thought it would be an expedition, an exploration — something exciting where 6th graders got to discover previously unknown numbers.
Austin Kleon has this blog post about “Mishearing as a creative act” — and as someone who was mishearing, misremembering and misunderstanding things my whole life, I completely agree. I think math, the sciences — learning generally — should be what I thought the cool, older 6th graders were doing: exploring, discovering, playing with boundaries.
If I’ve spent too much time in this essay talking about everything but the book, it’s because that’s what the book did for me — like the best of non fiction, it was a jumping off point for a hundred ideas and theories.
It was so invigorating to read about this mind and these ideas which were contending with each other to define the world we now live in. For a synopsis on Neumann’s life, you’ll have to go to Bhattacharya himself — and for a recommendation of him as an author, reading one page will make the exemplary nature of his work self explanatory. What I can tell you about this book is that after all this time, I’m glad I can still discover books that I try begrudgingly and then fall totally in love with, because that’s what got me started on this project in the first place!
