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A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES
By: 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 GΓΆdel, the greatest logician of many centuries, and with Alan Turing, the extraordinary mathematician, breaker of the Enigma Code during World War II. βThey are both brilliantly original and outsiders,β the narrator tells us. βThey 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.β Which she does in a haunting, incantatory voice, the two lives unfolding in parallel narratives that overlap in the magnitude of each manβs achievement and demise: GΓΆdel, 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 narratorβs 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 eventβA 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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