A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

In this remarkable work of fiction, astrophysicist Janna Levin reimagines the lives of two of the most important and influential minds of our time.

The narrator is a scientist herself, a physicist obsessed with Kurt GÂ¶del, the greatest logician of many centuries, and with Alan Turing, the extraordinary mathematician, breaker of the Enigma Code during World War II. â‚¬Å“They are both brilliantly original and outsiders,â‚¬Â the narrator tells us. â‚¬Å“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.â‚¬Â Which she does in a haunting, incantatory voice, the two lives unfolding in parallel narratives that overlap in the magnitude of each manâ‚¬s achievement and demise: GÂ¶del, 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 narratorâ‚¬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 eventâ‚¬"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.
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 62-00315
ReleaseDate 2006-08-22
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781400040308

Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	62-00315
ReleaseDate	2006-08-22
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781400040308

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

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