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A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
Janna Levin
In this remarkable work of fiction, astrophysicist Janna Levin reimagines the lives of two of the most important and influential minds of our time.
Knopf
September 2006
On Sale: August 22, 2006
240 pages
ISBN: 1400040302
EAN: 9781400040308
Hardcover
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Fiction
The narrator is a scientist herself, a physicist obsessed
with Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of many centuries,
and with Alan Turing, the extraordinary mathematician,
breaker of the Enigma Code during World War II. “They are
both brilliantly original and outsiders,” the narrator tells
us. “They are both besotted with mathematics. But for all
their devotion, mathematics is indifferent, unaltered by any
of their dramas . . . Against indifference, I want to tell
their stories.” Which she does in a haunting, incantatory
voice, the two lives unfolding in parallel narratives that
overlap in the magnitude of each man’s achievement and
demise: Gödel, delusional and paranoid, would starve himself
to death; Turing, arrested for homosexual activities, would
be driven to suicide. And they meet as well in the
narrator’s mind, where facts are interwoven with her desire
and determination to find meaning in the maze of their
stories: two men devoted to truth of the highest abstract
nature, yet unable to grasp the mundane truths of their own
lives.
A unique amalgam of luminous imagination and
richly evoked historic character and event—A Madman
Dreams of Turing Machines is a story about the pursuit
of truth and its effect on the lives of two men. A story of
genius and madness, incredible yet true.
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