Product desciption
A Madman Dreams Of Turing Machines Janna Levin by Janna Levin instant download after payment.
Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems sent shivers through Vienna's intellectual circles and directly challenged Ludwig Wittgenstein's dominant philosophy. Alan Turing's mathematical genius helped him break the Nazi Enigma Code during WWII. Though they never met, their lives strangely mirrored one another--both were brilliant, and both met with tragic ends. Here, a mysterious narrator intertwines these parallel lives into a double helix of genius and anguish, wonderfully capturing not only two radiant, fragile minds but also the zeitgeist of the era.
From the Trade Paperback edition.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 Gödel,
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: Gödel, 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 liv…
