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Benjamín Labatut

Biography

Benjamín Labatut

Benjamín Labatut is a Chilean author born in the Netherlands in 1980. He was raised in The Hague before settling in Chile, where he lives and works. He is the author of ANTARCTICA STARTS HERE (2009), a short story collection; AFTER THE LIGHT (2016), a series of scientific, philosophical and historical notes on the void; THE STONE OF MADNESS (2021), a diptych on madness, chaos and modernity; and WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD (2021), a book that explores the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs and has been translated into over 30 languages.

Benjamín Labatut

Books by Benjamín Labatut

The MANIAC
by Benjamín Labatut - Fiction

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programmable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. THE MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces. It ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo.