A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
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"The narrator is a scientist herself, a physicist obsessed with Kurt Godel, 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: Godel, 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."--Jacket.
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I think the best way to describe the genre of this book is to say it's a novelized account of the places where the lives of the great mathematicians Kurt Godel and Alan Turing echoed each other, and overlapped. I found it moving, but I think someone who doesn't know much about the work of these two men (Turing's work on computability coming out of his response to Godel's theorem of the incompleteness of mathematics) would have a hard time appreciating it. Some basic knowledge is assumed.
The third person omniscient viewpoint which alternates between Godel's and Turing's stories is completely absorbing. The predicaments of these two men's lives shown side by side makes a compelling story. So, It was jarring to have the occasional interruption of a narrator commenting on her relationship to the truth or the reality of other people. I wish the author had left those reflections out and let those themes speak for themselves in the stories she was telling about Godel and Turing.
Otherwise, this is a sensitive book about a pair of geniuses who struggled in tandem for a while. I recommend it.
