Status Updates From Maniac

Well, this one has started off beautifully :))

The book moved on to von Neumann helping to build the atomic bomb with accounts from Feynman and computer scientists. Apparently von Neumann was very pro hydrogen bomb. He also helped build one of the first computers that could load software, which he assembled in Princeton. He spent much of the 50s trying to build some kind of artificial intelligence, which his technology was not advanced enough to support.

The first chunk of this book gives us a short story about the physicist Paul Ehrenfest who had such intense depression that he ended up shooting his disabled son and then himself. Then the book describes the early career of John von Neumann from the perspective of his family and friends. He worked under Hilbert for a while even as the Nazis were taking control, but finally gave up that work after Gödel thwarted him.