Spanning most of the last century, the Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut’s stunningly propulsive new novel, The MANIAC, presents as a triptych about three (real) scientific prodigies whose gifts lead them down the path to madness, and our world to a newly perilous place. Open this photo in gallery: Author Benjamin Labatut.Handout Its dominant central figure is the Jewish Hungarian mathematician Joseph von Neumann, who created the first programmable computer and helped lay the theoretical foundations for quantum mechanics, the atomic bomb, game theory and AI (despite his centrality to the Manhattan Project, von Neumann is not in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer)….