Dr Administrator

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Apr 30 2026

Book review: King of kings by Scott Anderson

Another result of browsing in a bookshop, this review is of King of kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran by Scott Anderson. For readers of the future – this review was written in April 2026, two months into the what is currently called the “2026 Iran War“.

King of Kings covers the run up to the Iranian revolution in 1979 mainly focussing on the 1970s and ends with the release of the American Embassy hostages in January 1981. The acknowledgements talk about the aim of the book being to capture the Revolution from the point of view of those involved through interviews with them. The book was published in 2025 and those interviewed are in their late seventies and older now.

I think it is inevitable that the focus is on American participants – Anderson specifically calls out Michael Metrinko and Gary Sick as key contributors. Sick was a member of the National Security Council under President Carter, and was the principal White House aide focused on the Persian Gulf. Metrinko was the US consul in the Iranian city of Tabriz in the run up to the Revolution and was one of the US Embassy hostages. However, Anderson also spoke with the Shah’s Queen, Farah Pahlavi who is still alive.

From the revolutionary side, those surrounding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the spiritual leader of the revolution – there is relatively little. Ebrahim Yazdi, one of his closest advisors, gets a chapter and is referenced throughout the book.

King of kings is divided into three parts: the first titled “Towards a great civilisation” provides some background on Iran and the Shah – leader of Iran from 1953 until the 1979 Revolution; the second “The Unravelling” covers the build up to the revolution, mainly in 1978 and “Downfall” covers the revolution itself from the end of 1978 through to the return of the US embassy hostages in January 1981.

The Shah claimed a dynasty for Iran going back 2500 years, in fact one of the key events in the early part of this book was an extravagant celebration of this anniversary at Persepolis. Iran lay at the collision point between the the expanding British and Russian Empires in the 19th century, oil was discovered in 1908 and largely signed away to the British by the ruling Qajar dynasty. During the First World War Iran was a battleground for Russian and German forces, in the process 2 million Iranians died. In the Second World War Iran sought an accommodation with Germany which worked fine until Russia and Britain joined forces to invade Iran; they deposed Reza Khan, the Shah’s father in 1941 and installed him (Mohammad Reza) as monarch.

In the post-war period the country was governed by the Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh who introduced a range of social reforms, and nationalised the oil industry much to the chagrin of the British and Americans who deposed him in a CIA backed coup in 1953 re-instating Mohammad Reza as an absolute monarch.

The Shah ran the country as a dictatorship although he introduced a large set of social reforms in his 1963 White Revolution which upset more conservative Muslims such as Khomeini.

Iran as a country became very wealthy very rapidly in the seventies as a result of the Shah nationalising the oil industry, and OPEC starting to exert itself (1973 is a key year here). At the same time the US essentially entirely opened up arms sales to Iran and the Shah was a very willing customer. But the wealth was very unevenly distributed, Iran urbanised rapidly bringing many young men into cities not prepared for them. These young men were often conservative from a religious point of view.

There had long been opposition groups in Iran but they were subject to arrest, violence from the secret police (SAVAK) or, like Khomeini, exile. Khomeini had been living in Iraq but Saddam Hussein was becoming increasingly unhappy with his presence and he fled to France in October 1978. This turned out to be a fortuitous move because he was much more able to hold court with Western journalists there with his lieutenants he was able to present a (completely fake) moderate face.

It’s difficult to pinpoint a point at which the revolution started, Iran is a Shia majority country and offers a wide range of dates for public displays of mourning which could be readily repurposed to rioting. This started happening with increasing frequency and surprising precision from the start of 1978 following a government sanctioned news paper editorial attacking Khomeini. Precision because very particular businesses and institutions were targeted by well-disciplined rioters. I think this is part of the story is missing something, it seems clear there was significant organisation on the ground of the revolutionary forces and there is no real indication of Khomeini being very actively involved in this.

The Revolution, when it came, followed the departure of the Shah from Iran on 16th January 1979 – having installed Shapour Bakhtiari as Prime Minister – an opposition leader of long standing – with a view to arranging a moderate post-revolutionary government. Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran on 1st February 1979. Outside of Iran he had been making moderate noises but on his return to Iran he resumed his theocratic radicalism, sacking the recently installed Prime Minister and adding his own. The army mutinied in favour of Khomeini’s forces. A number of senior figures from the previous regime were summarily executed within a month of Khomeini’s return. He then set about making a constitution that handed power entirely to clerics (and ultimately himself).

There was possibly a space for a more moderate government but that ended with the US embassy hostage crisis and the US’s botched rescue attempt. The Embassy had been invaded by radical university students and it is not clear whether Khomeini had sanctioned the attack but in any case he supported it once done. Also unclear is whether Ronald Reagan’s campaign team had influenced the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages – it seems very plausible – they were released on the eve of Reagan’s inauguration. Interestingly the Revolutionary Iranians were keen to do arms deals with the Americans since they had a large quantity of US military hardware and needed consumables resupply.

Anderson’s conclusion regarding the Revolution was that the Shah seemed strangely inert as the revolution approached, attributing this to him being a dictator but not of the sufficiently brutal, bloodthirsty type to put a stop to opposition. In common with all dictators he ended up surrounding himself with people that only agreed with him. I can’t help thinking his deteriorating health played a role – he died at the age of 60 in 1980 having fled Iran in January 1979, he had been fairly seriously ill for several years but kept it secret even from his wife.

The US was almost completely oblivious to the tide rising against the Shah, very few of their embassy staff spoke the local language (Farsi) and they were discouraged from speaking to any sort of opposition to the Shah. They were also doing good business with Shah for military hardware, and saw him as a moderate bastion and ally in the area. As the revolution unfolded the institutions of the US government were fairly actively fighting each other.

I found this gripping reading, partly because of its current relevance but also because it is well written. It is clear that the American focus does not capture the internal workings of the revolutionary forces very well but I suspect that is still a hard problem even now, for Middle Eastern writers.

Jul 02 2023

Book review: The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan

frankopanIt is rare that I am menaced by the sheer size of a book but The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan has done this to a degree. The Silk Roads, by the same author is similarly massive. So in a break from my usual habit I am going to review as I read.

The book is about the interplay of climate and humanity, and how humanity impacts the environment with an attempt to cover history across the world rather than focussing on Western Europe.

The extensive footnotes for this book are found in a separate downloadable pdf.

0 – Introduction – Frankopan is a year younger than me – born in 1971, and his early memories were shaped by news reports of acid rain, the fear of nuclear winter and Chernobyl – all stark demonstrations of man’s potential impact on the environment.

1 – The World from the Dawn of Time(4.5bn-7m BC) – The earth’s environment has always been changing, in deep time there was a much lower concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere. Those animals we see around us are the result of evolution through multiple cataclysmic environmental events.

2 – On the origins of our species (7m BC-12,000BC) – Climate change in central Africa and growing social groups led to speciation of the hominid group. We started large scale manipulation of the environment – managing forests with fire – 65,000 years ago.

3 – Human interactions with Ecologies (c.12000-c.3500BC) – End of the Younger Dryas and the start of the Holocene is a key point for civilisations, the climate becomes more benign and stable and larger settlements start to grow.

4 – The first cities and trade networks (c3500-c2500 BC) – the first cities are founded, and arguably the first anthropogenic climate change takes place. With cities came hierarchies, ownership and vulnerability to shocks and disease.

5 – On the risks of living beyond one’s means (2500BC-c.2200BC) – One such shock is the great drought of 2200BC, often seen as a global phenomena but actually rather complicated with different regional effects and an impact which was perhaps most obvious on the ruling class.

6 – The first age of connectivity (c.2200-c.800BC) – the environment provides resources unevenly, and so trade is necessary as societies become more sophisticated, these trade networks lead to interdependence so when one society falls others are impacted. The trade is not just in goods but also in ideas.

7 – Regarding Nature and the Divine (c1700-c.300BC) – Religions which we still see today arose several hundred years BC, and many of them made references to the environment. The ruler was often an intermediary to the gods/control of the weather – rain being particularly important. Even in this time there were exhortations to preserve the environment.

8 – The Steppe Frontier and Formation of Empires (c.1700-c.300BC) – the Eurasian steppes provided a catalyst for the growth of empires in the neighbouring region, alongside the domestication of the horse in about 3000BC. This combination provided rapid transport, and the flatness of the terrain made expansion easy. There is also an interplay between nomadic and pastoral peoples.

9 – The Roman Warm Period (c.300BC-AD c.500) – the Roman Empire grew at a time of benign and stable climatic conditions – and fell when those climatic conditions changed. Contemporary writers noted the pollution in Rome and other big cities. We can see the lead of the Roman Empire in Greenland ice cores.

10 – The Crisis of Late Antiquity (AD c.500-c.600) – the decades from 530AD saw multiple volcanic eruptions leading to global cooling, food shortages, and the rise of disease (the Justinian plague) and the fall of empires.

11 – The Golden Age of Empire (c.600-c.900) – the Prophet Mohammad’s agreement with the ruling elite in Mecca in 628AD provided an Arab identity that grew to an Empire stretching across North Africa and into Spain. Trade grows with sub-Saharan Africa. These patterns are replicated in the Americas and the Far East. Literacy grew in the eighth century with the introduction of paper from China. Empires started to decline in the 9th century as another warmer drier period started.

12 – The Medieval Warm Period (c.900-c.1250) – the Medieval Warm Period was both warm, and stable with unusually low levels of volcanic activity. During this time there was a large growth in global population, and Northern Europe saw significant growth. This growth was a result of improvements in crops and technology, as well as the benign climate.

13 – Disease and the formation of a New World (c.1250-c.1450) – the 13th century saw the rise of the Mongol empire, under Genghis Khan, stimulated by wetting weather in the steppe leading to more productive pasture when other areas were suffering drought. But the wet weather and the extensive trade networks of the Empire led to the rise of Black Death. Interesting parallels between post-Plague and post-1918 influenza Europe – the roaring twenties.

14 – On the expansion of Ecological Horizons (c.1400-c.1500) – the 14th and 15th century saw the fall of some of those empires that rose during the earlier more benign and stable weather, more driven by the instability of large empires than by climate change. It also saw the European "exploration" of the world and the large scale transport of plant and animal species across the world.

15 – The Fusion of the Old and the New Worlds (c.1500-c.1700) – the European "discovery" of the New World introduced a massive migration of flora and fauna around the world, potatoes, tomatoes,chillies from the New World to the Old. Pigs, sheep, goats and cattle from the Old to the New.

16 – On the exploitation of Nature and People (c.1650-c.1750) – the new sugar, tobacco and cotton industries required a large workforce, resistant to malaria, and Africans fitted the bill – this chapter to about slavery.

17 – The Little Ice Age (c.1550-c.1800) – the Little Ice Age has long been known but its magnitude was quite variable around the world, many things have been ascribed to the Little Ice Age but connections and causality are tenuous. The 17th century saw significant developments in military technology and spending on professional armies in Europe. There was also a large rise in urbanisation. Variable weather, uncertain crops hit some countries hard.

18 – Concerning Great and Little Divergences (c.1600-c.1800) – 1600-1800 was the period in which the economies of Europe diverged from those of Asia and Africa, and in Europe the North pulled away from the South. The introduction of the potato to Europe was important, as was maize and manioc (cassava) to Africa.

19 – Industry, extraction and the Natural World (c.1800-c.1870) – markets became truly global with wheat from North America cheaper to ship from Canada to Liverpool than from Dublin to Liverpool. Colonialism was at its height with Britain leading the world and the Americans expelling indigenous people from their own lands.

20 – The Age of Turbulence (c.1870-c.1920) – new resources became ripe for exploitation like rubber, guano and tin. Industrialisation proceeded apace. Concerns about climate began, and the Carrington Event and the Krakatoa eruption started scientists thinking about global impacts. Global pandemics made an appearance for both people and animals.

21 – Fashioning New Utopias (c.1920-c.1950) – the middle years of the 20th century saw a new wave of exploitation with oil, copper, uranium and more recently lithium becoming important resources. Colonialism receded but was replaced by corporate and government interference in states. In the Soviet Union ecological damage, and great human upheaval was driven by the dash to modernise but in a communist rather than capitalist framework.

22 – Reshaping the Global Environment (the mid-Twentieth Century) – the USSR and the USA started large scale environmental modification projects, see Teller’s proposals to use nuclear explosions to change just about anything.

23 – The Sharpening of Anxieties (c.1960-c.1990) – in the sixties the USA and USSR got heavily into weather modification, and the Americans into Agent Orange in Vietnam. The USA programme was conducted in deep secrecy, and when it was revealed there was an outcry which lead to a treaty banning such environmental modification. This led to a wider thaw of Cold War interactions.

24 – On the edge of Ecological Limits (c.1990-today) – the 1990s saw the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Industrial China. It also saw the discussions over climate change heating up.

25 – Conclusions – Frankopan’s conclusion is rather gloomy, he highlights how we are failing to act on climate change but then points we may suffer worse consequences from volcanic activity, or an asteroid strike!

There are themes across the whole book, in the environment we see periods of stable climate interspersed by periods of change – particularly driven by volcanic eruptions. From the human side we see the growing scale of civilisations, larger civilisations with more connections are more vulnerable to instability and the fall of other civilisations. We see ever increasing urbanisation and exploitation of the environment at ever greater scale.

Although initially intimidating, I found The Earth Transformed rather readable – perhaps because I saw each chapter as a separate essay.

Jun 30 2023

Leaving Address

suit-collageAs of 5pm this afternoon I will no longer be working at GBG.

Since the pandemic leaving a company has been a subdued event with many slipping off into the night, scarcely noticed. This morning I had a final standup with the Data Science Team who shared the card everyone had written in and your gift.

I wanted to write down my thoughts on leaving, and to thank everyone for making my time at GBG – nearly 8 years – an enjoyable one.

I am not mentioning any names for reasons of my failing memory, and GDPR, a subject of which I have surprising knowledge – I first sat in GBG in the Compliance team which was at the time named differently and was rather more diverse in its members.

In my career I have been a university lecturer, a research scientist at Unilever, a data scientist at a start-up and finally a data scientist at GBG. I have been used to working in environments full of scientists. GBG represented quite a dramatic and refreshing change for me. I have enjoyed meeting and chatting to you all. It turns out I even enjoyed talking to potential customers – something I had not done before.

I have sat in the Chester office, in pretty much the same place, for my entire time at GBG with a slowly changing cast of characters. It was a spot where we could watch the world go by, occasionally seeing cars driving into the ornamental lake. When lockdown came we migrated to a Teams channel called “The Lonely Aisle”. My aisle mates hold a special place in my heart.

It will surprise many to learn that previously I have not been known for my collection of flamboyant suits, I think everyone will know what I am talking about here! I have always worked in environments which either didn’t have a company Christmas party or I didn’t attend. All I can say is that for one Christmas party my watch recorded 13 miles of dancing! I have illustrated this post with a collection of photos of me, in my suits, which feels a little odd but I have so few pictures of you.

I was given the Property Intelligence dataset to create on my first day in GBG by the Business Unit leader, and working on it will be the last thing I do as I leave. It was with some sadness I sent the email marking the end of the most recent build to the Product Manager.

The Dave’s from the Chester Production team have been a fixture throughout my time at GBG and I have enjoyed working with them all. “The Dave’s” does not count as revealing names since it is the law that members of the Production team are Dave even when they aren’t.

I would like to thank all my line managers at GBG, in retrospect I realise that I considered them “keepers” who had been assigned to me somewhat arbitrarily for bureaucratic reasons. I generally took what they considered to be directions as suggestions. This attitude may have led to some friction on occasion but I enjoyed our contractually required meetings.

It has long said on my blog that “[I work at] GBG where they pay me to do what I used to do for fun!”. I enjoy playing with data and computers, I have done since I was about 10. GBG actually paid me to attend meetings and do other things I did not enjoy. My play may not seem commercially relevant however it means I am in good position to address a wide range of urgent issues at short notice and I also made a bunch of interesting prototypes including voice input for address lookups, and the notorious Edited Electoral Roll in Elasticsearch experiment which probably marked my cards with Compliance – amongst many others.

It has only been in the last year or so that I have worked in a team of data scientist, prior to this I was a lone wolf or perhaps a rogue elephant. It was nice to work in a team where we could learn new things together.

I am not leaving voluntarily and the process of my departure has been stressful, for more than just me. I have been really touched by the support of my friends at GBG, and the wider Linkedin community, during this difficult time. If I can make one recommendation for those experiencing redundancy it is “Don’t suffer in silence”.

I go now to a better place! I know it is difficult to believe but it looks like I might actually be able to retire. I don’t think this is what I will do but I will take the summer off – the last before my son goes to high school. Then I will be looking for consulting style work. I welcome your thoughts on this, I’m not really prepared for retirement.

I am available on a wide range of social media platforms, so stop by and say hello.

Apr 08 2023

Book review: Margaret the First – A Biography of Margaret Cavendish by Douglas Grant

magaret_cavendishI have come across Margaret Cavendish in number of times in reading about the history of science, I think most recently in a biography of Christiaan Huygens. She is noted for attending a Royal Society meeting in 1666, and for being one of the earliest published female authors in England. She sounded very interesting so I picked up Margaret the First: A biography of Margaret Cavendish by Douglas Grant – one of the few biographies about her.

Margaret Cavendish was born in 1623 to the aristocratic Lucas family of Colchester and died at the relatively early age of 50 in 1673. As a child she was a keen writer, and picked up an interest in science from her brother John although as a girl her formal education was limited.

The Lucas’s were fairly heavily involved in the Civil War on the Royalist side. Margaret joined the household of the queen, Henrietta Maria, as a maid of honour in 1643. She fled to Paris with the queen’s household in 1644.  At this point William Cavendish (1st Duke of Newcastle), later to became Margaret’s husband enters the story – he was immensely wealthy and was Captain-General to the Royalist army North England. Following the Battle of Marston Moor he too fled to Europe – to Hamburg in the first instance.

William Cavendish was widower – his first wife, Elizabeth having died in 1643. Margaret and William met in Paris and were married in late 1645. Having read quite a lot of scientific biography I am starting to get a feel for what written resources are available to the biographer – in this case I suspect it was Margaret’s published writings and the financial records of her husband, which were most important. In exile William Cavendish was always struggling for money, although he seems to have had the gift of the gab since a number of times they appear on the brink of destitution which is resolved when William goes and talks to his creditors!

Whilst in Paris, Margaret dined with at least René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes – there was a fairly active salon culture in Paris at the time in which I believe women were moderately involved. In England involvement in intellectual circles appears to have been forbidden for women but perhaps it was a little more open in Paris.

The couple moved to Antwerp in 1648, where they lived in Rubens old house, again surviving on credit which William Cavendish often seemed to spend on horses! It was at this time that Margaret started to write for publication. Grant’s broad view of her output could be summarised as "needed an editor", she appeared to write straight to publication with little sign of returning to work to correct and edit for structure and coherence. 

Her early books were poetic with a theme of natural philosophy, this isn’t as outlandish as it first sounds – Erasmus Darwin was to write poetically about natural philosophy in the following century. Her atomic theories would read oddly to our eyes but were not inconsistent with prevailing theories of the time. She sat within the Classical / Cartesian school of natural philosophy with an emphasis on pure thought which in the second half of the 17th century was being displaced by a science driven by observation and experiment. In fact she wrote some criticism of the newly invented microscope. Her writing covers a wide range of forms (poetry, prose, plays, orations, letters), and a substantial fraction of it is what you might describe as romantic fiction – although The Blazing World has been described as proto-science fiction.

Margaret and her husband returned to England in 1660 following the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658 and the Restoration of Charles II. After spending some time in London, whilst William Cavendish regained possession of his estates, the couple retired to the country from where Margaret promoted her writing – providing free copies of her books to universities and individuals. It is during this period that she attended a meeting of the Royal Society, Samuel Pepys is quite critical of her and the general impression was that men felt she shouldn’t have been there.

She died rather suddenly in 1673, a few years before her much older husband who died in 1676.

It would seem that Margaret Cavendish was a very bright young woman, who missed out almost entirely on any sort of education because she was a women. Her interest in science was promoted by her older brother John, her husband and his brother as well as extensive correspondence and dinners with leading intellectuals of the day arising from her time in Paris and Antwerp. Her work was published and promoted broadly most likely because of the power of her husband, which also served to mute criticism. She was widely seen as a rather eccentric character, in part this seems to be down to a vintage dress sense but her simply writing would probably been a factor too.

It would be nice to report that Margaret Cavendish was a pioneer, soon followed by other women into the public, scientific sphere but she wasn’t. Caroline Herschel’s work was presented to the Royal Society in 1788 – over 100 years later, exceptionally Queen Victoria became a member of the Royal Society but it wasn’t until 1945 that Kathleen Lonsdale and Marjory Stephenson became the first female fellows of the Royal Society. The first women to study for undergraduate degrees started in 1880 with Oxford and Cambridge not awarding degrees to women until 1920 and 1945 respectively.

This book was published in 1956, there are a limited number of biographies of Margaret Cavendish and although this one was entirely acceptable it is a bit dated and I can’t help feeling there will have been a lot of scholarly work done on her life in the intervening years.

Mar 19 2023

Book review: The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya

von_neumannThe Man from The Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya has been sitting on my bedside table in the "to be read" pile for a little while. I was aware of Von Neumann largely through his work on computers, and game theory.

The book is organised thematically, firstly on Von Neumann’s early years then on the various fields in which he made contributions.

Neumann János Lajos was born in Budapest in 1903, the Hungary style was to put the family name first – his father was ennobled in 1903 – hence the "von" and he Anglicised his forename to John when he moved to America in 1930. Hungary, and Budapest, in Von Neumann’s time was a hot bed of intellectuals many of whom fled Europe to America with the rise of the Nazis. For someone with a background in physics it is a bit of a Who’s Who – Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Theodore von Kármán, Edward Teller, Dennis Gabor – were all his contemporaries and he seemed to know them personally.

Von Neumann’s first contributions to the academic world were in set theory, he published a paper on defining cardinal and ordinal numbers in 1921 which still stands today. This was at a time when maths was undergoing a foundational crisis, which Einstein described as "Froschmäusekreig" – a war of frogs and mice – a term I aim to use in future!

The set theory paper was written whilst he was still at school, he then moved on to study simultaneously a degree in Chemistry at Berlin, chemical engineering in Zurich at ETH and a doctorate in maths at Budapest – passing all with flying colours. He then moved on to Göttingen in about 1925 where Heisenberg was working. Von Neumann’s contribution was Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics published in 1932 – not translated into English for 20 years. His key contribution was demonstrating that Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Schrödinger’s wave equation theories of quantum mechanics were equivalent. To a degree I feel his contribution held back the field, backing as it did the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (i.e. "shut up and calculate") – it wasn’t until the late 1950’s that other started probing the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics in more depth.

It was during this period he was enticed to Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Studies. As German science declined under the Nazis due to their purges of "undesirables" from the civil service and universities, American science which had been in the doldrums rose – one at the cost of the other.

Von Neumann was clearly politically astute and had seen war coming in the early thirties, in the late thirties he was pro-actively trying to join the US army – fortunately redirected into the Manhattan Project (a project stuffed with scientists later to become Nobel Prize winners). His key contributions were in the simulations done for the implosion bomb (at a time when the idea of computer simulations was radical and new and not yet expressed). I hadn’t realised before was that airburst bomb are used because they are more destructive than the same explosives detonated at ground level, this is why the Trinity test was executed on a tower. Von Neumann was also on the committee that chose the targets for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the war.

Von Neumann’s work on the Bomb, and his mathematical interests led him naturally into computing. Prior to the war, as part of the fundamentals of mathematics, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing and Alonzo Church had done work essential to the foundation of computing. Turing’s work in particular demonstrated that theoretically a machine could be built which could carry out any computation but Gödel had shown that not all problems were computable. Von Neumann met with Alan Turing in 1942, it is not clear what they talked about I imagine both the Bomb and Turing’s codebreaking work at the Bletchley Park were topics of conversation.

Von Neumann had worked with computing devices on implosion calculations, an activity in which his second wife Klára Dán von Neumann was heavily involved. After the war a number of groups were working on computers, and he was convinced that the computer would be more revolutionary than the atomic bomb. His key contribution was a draft report on the EDVAC computer being built at the Moore School of Engineering in the University of Pennsylvania. The significance of this report was that it described clearly the architecture of a modern computer with input and output units, a central processor, memory and so forth – previously computers had largely been designed for very specific tasks and appear to have been logically complex. Von Neumann’s report was widely circulated much to the chagrin of his collaborators who had hoped for lucrative patents on the design of computers.

Stepping back in time a bit, Von Neumann had started working on what would come to be known as "game theory" in the 1920s, publishing his first paper in this area in 1926, followed by another in 1937 and finally a book written with Oskat Morgenstern, Theory of Games in 1943. After the Second World War mathematicians started to infiltrate economics departments and apply game theory ideas to economic problems. This has resulted in some very lucrative public auctions (designed using ideas stemming from game theory), and a fair number of Nobel Prizes in economics.

After the Second World War the US government set up the RAND Corporation which was a think tank, possibly the original think tank. They undertook a wide range of research, trying to maintain the spirit that drove the development of the atomic bomb, radar, codebreaking during the Second World War but also operations research. Von Neumann acted as a consultant and was seen very much as the father of the organisation without necessarily holding an exalted formal position. It was at this time, when they had the only nuclear weapons that the US contemplated a first strike against the Soviets. Von Neumann started quite hawkish but become more dovish over time.

The final chapter of the book is on cellular automata, stimulated by Alan Turing’s universal machine, and also how life works – in the post-war period the structure and mechanism by which DNA works was being elucidated and a number of physicists were interested in both the structure of DNA and how it transmits information. Cellular automata are perhaps best know by John Conway’s Life game. His work was prompted by Von Neumann, although Von Neumann’s book on cellular automata was not published until 10 years after his death in 1957 from bone cancer.

I must admit the book made me think of the nature of a biography, this one is quite heavily focused on scientific themes – Von Neumann is usually introduced at the beginning of the chapter with an outline of his contributions but then a wider cast of characters are brought in. The alternative is more focussed on the minutiae of the central characters life.

From a personal point of view we find Von Neumann is a bit of party animal, married twice with one daughter. His wives found him rather absorbed in his work. His occasionally harsh exterior harboured a more caring private side.

The Man from the Future is an enjoyable read if you have some interest in computing and physics, although deep knowledge of those areas is not required.