A Madman Dreams Of Turing Machines

Janna Levin

This is a remarkable fiction debut from a young female physicist obsessed with two giants of twentieth century science: Kurt Godel, the greatest logician of the age, and Alan Turing, the breaker of the Enigma code. Janna Levin tells their parallel lives in a haunting story of tortured genius, persecution and death. Godel became delusional and paranoid to the point he starved himself to death. Turing, despite his brilliant war work, was hounded to destruction because he was homosexual. Both men devoted their lives to the highest truths of abstract nature, yet were unable to grapple with the everyday world. A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES is a haunting, elegaic story that flows back and forth between Turing, Godel and the author.