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Benjamín Labatut Will Not Be Profiled ‹ Literary Hub

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I sensed that Benjamín Labatut would be a challenge to profile because his work is heady and elusive. His English-language debut, When We Cease to Understand the World, was part-essay, part-fiction, a fractal sequence that dove into the imagined minds of scientists and mathematicians like Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Labatut’s wonderful new book, The MANIAC, is a triptych that centers on John von Neumann, a Hungarian polymath who conducted foundational work on computer science, game theory, and nuclear weaponry. The MANIAC opens in the vein of WWCtUtW, with a profile of Paul Ehrenfest, a mathematician who murdered his son, and it ends brilliantly with Lee Sedol’s game of Go against the computer Alpha Zero. Once again, some of the book’s plot is real, and some is invented. I did at least assume that this piece would be a welcome development for Labatut. I’d fly to Chile, chat with him, and do some whimsical activity (a game of Go?)—all in search of what the critic Parul Segh

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