A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: gross indecency, infinite list, Alan Turing, Oxford Street, Moritz Schlick

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The lives of Kurt Gödel (1906" 1978) and Alan Turing (1912" 1954) never crossed physically, but did intellectually: Gödel's incompleteness theorem implies a sort of Platonism, and Turing's mechanical decision theory implies, conversely, hard-nosed materialism. Levin, a mathematician, juxtaposes both lives in her debut novel. She begins with Gödel as a young man in Vienna, his incompleteness theorem destroying the line of inquiry (arguably spearheaded by Wittgenstein, who cameos)that argued math was complete in itself; his courtship with a nightclub dancer, Adele; his misunderstanding of the Nazi takeover of Austria. Alan Turing's not very charmed life is skewed not only by what looks like autism but by being hounded for his homosexuality in Britain"after breaking the German Enigma code during WWII. Turing is an innocent in many ways, while Gödel, a greater thinker, is a monster of selfishness; both, however, have a passion for the invisible that is hard to dramatize. Gödel becomes a paranoid old man, living with Adele (who comes alive through Levin's shrewd novelistic guesswork) in solitude in Princeton, and eventually starving himself to death. Levin is sympathetic to all concerned, but doesn't quite make a larger point, dramatic or otherwise. (Aug. 25)
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Review

“An absolutely wonderful book. Godel and Turning tried to defy time, and failed, so the only way to bring them back is through the imagination. It requires a very wise and special imagination, with a powerful and quirky mind of her own, to give a plausible portrait of such geniuses. Janna Levin is a gifted stylist and with this compelling book, she has transcended the category of scientists who write books to become simply one of our most interesting contemporary writers.”
–Lee Smolin, author of The Life of The Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

“I love the contrast of Turing's mechanized view of the world with Godel's more openended ‘incompleteness.’ A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is a wonderfully imagined book.”
–Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams

“A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is a wonderfully original book. Janna Levin's compelling narrative artfully straddles the realms of fiction and non-fiction, allowing us to viscerally experience the tortured lives of two towering intellects–Godel and Turing–while learning how each, in his own way, left a profound imprint on human thought.”
–Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe



From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400040302
• ISBN-13: 978-1400040308
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #505,069 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Strange Beautiful World, March 9, 2007

By	Little Borges (Chicago) - See all my reviews

Janna Levin has created a strange and beautiful world in this relatively short, very readable, compelling book. She pushes the line between fiction and nonfiction. The book sticks close to the biographical facts of two historical figures, towering intellects of the last century. Their stories are told by someone you might at first assume is the author. Only, this narrator is unreliable, distorting their stories not with untruths exactly but with hyper-real prose. The imagery is too vivid and eventually slightly surreal to be true. Eventually the narrator, a self-professed liar, becomes unreal too and you realize you don't even know who the narrator is. Maybe the narrator is you. Maybe it is all in your mind. At first I didn't get what she was doing with the narrator but then it hit me. She's saying it's all in our minds! This book makes you think about truth, the pursuit of truth, beauty and weakness.

I also found particularly compelling the descriptions of thought itself and the loneliness that can result from getting lost in your own world. I do have a science background but I shouldn't think you need a background in mathematics to appreciate the power thinking has over every aspect of our perceptions.

The subtle melding of fact and fiction is, well, subtle. Not everyone will get it. Not everyone will like it. But if you do get it, it's powerful. This book is special, a little gem.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Story brings these men and their struggles to life, September 25, 2007

By	armchairinterviews.com (Minnesota) - See all my reviews

Most people think of science and art as distinct, incompatible things. Janna Levin, in her first novel, brings those assumptions into question. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines follows the lives of two prominent scientists, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. The two were great geniuses of their times, and made scientific discoveries that changed the world: Godel proved mathematically that mathematics is limited in what we can know; Turing imagined and developed a machine to break the Nazi Enigma Code and subsequently paved the way for the invention of the computer.

But while you follow these mathematic achievements, you never get bogged down in their details. Levin does an excellent job referring to the science without derailing the narrative by attempting to explain it. The story is really about the personal struggles of these men of genius, their social ineptness, their anguish, their battles with faith and desire. The two men never met. The story alternates chapters between their two lives - Godel in Vienna in the 1930s and Turing in England from the 1930-1950s. But Turing knows of Godel's work, is affected by it, and their stories feel right being told together like they are.

Reading this book, you can imagine the pain of being socially outcast, of being misunderstood because your genius in one area renders your mind incomprehensible to other people, and your life an oddity that people pity or fear. By doing thorough research into the lives of Godel and Turing, Levin was able to base her fictionalized account on solid ground. What she imagines, with compassion and keen insight, is the anguish of their inner lives. Because of her own background in science (Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy), she understands the mathematics behind Godel's and Turing's achievements. She also, however, bridges the gap between that science and the art of storytelling, to depict their personal struggles, their day-to-day lives, loves, and the pain of being a human being trapped within a genius that separates you, in a specific but real way, from the rest of the world.

Armchair Interviews says: Such geniuses.

Interesting interview with Levin can be found on the website of the science magazine Seed, March 2007.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solitary Geniuses Suffer Solitary Madness, December 16, 2007

By	Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Paperback)

In glittering prose that swirls through time and place with an almost surreal quality, Janna Levin dances along the knife edge of madness that haunted the genius of two seminal figures of 20th Century thought, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. Levin mixes biography and fiction to recall these two men's magnificent intellectual accomplishments, Godel's mathematically renowned Incompleteness Theorem and Turing's theoretical conception of the calculation device that ultimately became known as the Turing machine. Added to this mix are appearances by two other lions of modern thought, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Oskar Morganstern.

Rather than belabor the content of these men's discoveries, however, A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES focuses instead on these tortured souls, geniuses both, whose lives ran in parallel with but the briefest of near-intersections. As her story alternates between her two protagonists, Levin introduces Kurt Godel as pathologically introverted, a man whose self-confidence can be shattered by the merest "tssk, tssk" from a more outspoken peer who disagrees. Godel, a man who labored in anonymity and whose name is still largely unrecognized by the general public, is presented by the author as having a weak physical constitution, thin to the point of self-starvation. His illness is only compounded by paranoia that he is being poisoned, if not by his food, then by his heating stove.

Alan Turing, subject of the theatrical production "Breaking the Code," is considered by many the father of modern computing. However, he is remembered as much for his homosexuality as for his vital role at Bletchley Park, England, in World War II, leading the British effort in cracking the Germans' Enigma code-making machine. Levin imagines Turing in all his peculiarities, from his boarding school experience of being bound helpless beneath a dormitory room floor and his Asperger-like difficulties with social interaction to his compulsive behavior with regard to foods of similar color and his ultimate death by suicide.

Both of Levin's "man-children," are nearly incapable of caring for themselves, Godel dependent on his devoted, self-effacing wife Adele Nimbursky and Turing on his friend and wife Joan Clarke. The author draws diverse connections between the two men, ranging from their philosophical ruminations and conversations with the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to their presence at Princeton to the story of Snow White and its device of the poisoned red apple. Yet despite its biographical focus, A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES is also a discourse on epistemology and the notion of free will. "How do we know what we know, and indeed what do we really know?" are questions that torture Godel, the man who literally imprisons himself in his room and starves himself to death while convinced he is merely exercising his free will in doing so. Turing, on the other hand, imagines human will as nothing more than the pre-ordained responses of a complex biomechanical system, human as computing machine, to be replicated someday by a programmable computing machine.

The triumph of Jenna Levin's work derives from placing the reader inside the psyches of two solitary and deluded geniuses. The result is an emotional roller coaster ride, alternating among moments of white-hot intellectual clarity, the grayest of self-doubts, and the blackest of despairs. These insights are delivered through an unidentified and omniscient "I," a 21st Century New Yorker searching as well for truth but only glimpsing it, however hazily, at the edge of peripheral vision. Thus it is with the reality of Godel's and Turing's lives - the truth can never be directly seen, but only inferred from a sideways glance.

A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES effectively mixes biography, psychology, philosophy, and mathematical logic into a compelling story that is at once informative and entertaining. While regrettably a bit light on the breadth and depth of Godel's life's work, this is nevertheless a book that is easy to recommend for its intriguing protagonists and its approach to two of the human wellsprings of 21st Century thought. Cleverly conceived and stylishly executed, A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES proves that Janna Levin is no ordinary physics professor.