This morning I read a beautiful piece by George Dyson (yes, that George Dyson) about the current financial crisis, and what it has to do with the man who helped invent the digital computer.
No, not Alan Turing---John von Neumann, who amongst other things, invented game theory, helped build the first nuclear bomb, began the science of cellular automata and autocatalysis, and, just for fun, changed economics utterly in one paper in 1937 (reprinted in english in 1945), written overnight when he was on holiday. He was that sort of chap.
Check out Dyson's article. It's really very clever, and uses the current crisis as a foil to help the reader understand complexity theory and the history of economics.