A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

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.