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Game theory was first presented in "The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior," published in 1944 by mathematicians and economists Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann.

Von Neumann is “searching for absolute truth, and he really believed that he would find a mathematical basis for reality, a land free from contradictions and paradoxes.”

The novel's final section, a thrilling human-versus-machine matchup, points to what von Neumann had wrought—and reflects the warnings of Labatut's Wigner.

The von Neumann section, constituting the bulk of the book, is blessedly lighter.

Labatut draws in a host of voices—von Neumann's wife, children, colleagues, rivals—to tell the story of the development of a brilliant mind but also of reason as “the destructive influence” that the novel's fictional Ehrenfest so feared.