The Maniac (Relié)

He was a fifty-three-year-old Jewish mathematician who had emigrated from Hungary to America in 1937, and yet at his bedside, hanging on his every word, sat Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission ; the Secretary of Defense ; the Deputy Secretary of Defense ; the Secretaries of Air, Army, and Navy ; and the military Chiefs of Staff all waiting for a final spark, one more idea from the individual who had birthed the modern computer, laid down the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, written the equations for the implosion of the atomic bomb, fathered the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, heralded the arrival of digital life, self-reproducing machines, artificial intelligence, and the technological singularity, and promised them godlike control over the Earth's climate, now wasting away before their eyes, screaming in agony, lost in delirium, dying, just like any other man.