A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

by Janna Levin

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.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Philosophy, Mathematics, Physics, Literature, Science Fiction

230 pages, Paperback

First published August 22, 2006

About the author

Janna Levin, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, holds a BA in Physics and Astronomy with a concentration in Philosophy from Barnard College of Columbia University, and a PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her scientific research mainly centers around the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes.

Dr. Levin's first book, "How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space," is a widely popular science book following her personal recollections, as well as scientific studies, in letter format. Her second book, "A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines" (Knopf, 2006), won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for writers that "honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work... represents distinguished literary achievement..."

Dr. Levin also has written a series of essays to accompany exhibitions at galleries in England and been featured on several radio and television programs.

Reviews

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began writing a short story about Alan Turing last year. Despite a lengthy scribbled outline it remains a stunted opening gambit. After reading Janna Levin's A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines I really feel far less of a need to finish what I started, because she basically captured what I'd kept confined in my head, off the page. I still might finish it one day, but after reading David Leavitt's beautiful Turing biography (The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer) and this incredible historical fiction of Levin's I feel like they've jointly completed what I wanted to see carried out: a sensitive, detailed, intellectually astute and "literary" portrait of this far too underappreciated genius and his tragic decline.

This is the historically-informed story of two 20th century intellectual giants, Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel. Other real life figures make supporting appearances such as Wittgenstein and Otto Neurath. There are also very brief and well-placed metafictional entries and minute allusions that bring the author into the fold in a narrator-as-character manner, as can be seen in the very (non-)beginning of the book:

"There is no beginning. I've tried to invent one but it was a lie and I don’t want to be a liar. This story will end where it began, in the middle. A triangle or a circle. A closed loop with three points.

At one apex is a paranoid lunatic, at another is a lonesome outcast: Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of many centuries; and Alan Turing, the brilliant code breaker and mathematician. Their genius is a testament to our worth, an antidote to insignificance; and their bounteous flaws are luckless but seemingly natural complements, as though greatness can be doled out only with an equal measure of weakness."

The connection between mental illness and artistic and intellectual greatness is a long established cliché by this point and is probably far too often overstated via confirmation bias. There’s a fantastic documentary called Dangerous Knowledge which focuses on four mathematicians and/or scientists who all grappled with hugely complex and difficult issues like the nature of the deepest structures of reality, infinity, human consciousness, free will v. determinism, etc, and all ended up killing themselves. Turing and Gödel are two of the four. There’s an implication that it was their theories and obsessive intellectual aspirations that drove them to commit suicide, which I think is a rather flawed notion considering the facts and other plausible explanations. However, it does make for compelling narrative to peer into the lives of tortured geniuses consumed by their own big brains or whatever, and is an excellent sounding board for thinking about the pursuit of knowledge and its various costs and benefits. In any case, these are fascinating stories, and Turing’s in particular I find the most captivating and tragic.

Alan Turing's influence is felt hugely in the realm of computer science, cryptology, Artificial Intelligence and mathematical logic more generally. He’s often credited as one of the single most important influences on the development of the modern computer—without Turing we may not be having this exchange of information right now. He also played a hugely instrumental role in cracking the German Naval Enigma Code in WWII with his tireless cryptology work and innovations in the field which allowed for a far more rapid decoding of the German transmissions that were quite literally matters of life or death. After the war he was arrested for admitting to having homosexual relationships to the police after he reported being burgled by a casual fling—arrested and prosecuted by the very same government he’d served and protected. Instead of going to prison he was chemically castrated. The regimen of huge doses of estrogen caused him to gain weight and grow breasts, fall into a chemical depression, and ultimately end his life by eating a cyanide-glazed apple, mimicking one of his favorite films, Snow White. Turing was persecuted to death. The British government has the blood of a genius (who saved them from further Axis-led destruction) on their hands. Only as recently as 2009 has the British government issued an official apology for this incident that occurred in 1952 (however the same government has rejected the proposal to posthumously pardon Turing of his "crimes"). It took the Roman Catholic Church 359 years to finally officially apologize for persecuting Galileo for positing that the Earth revolves around the sun, so perhaps this is the sign of a kind of progress, but it still all feels far too little, far too late.

Kurt Gödel was a mathematician and logician (the distinction between the two starts to break down at a certain point) who famously constructed his Incompleteness Theorems, which I still have trouble explaining, because I’m a dummy when it comes to mathematics and formal logic (Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem For Dummies). I am truly ignorant about mathematical matters, but I can appreciate from my perch of acknowledged ignorance the allure of "the sanctity and purity of mathematics, the profound truth so completely immune to human stains." Gödel was also an absolute loon. He held a deep paranoid fear of being poisoned and as such rarely ate anything and only enough to keep his skeletal frame alive, and had elaborate rituals involving his wife’s cooking. He was also a member of the famed Vienna Circle, a group of intellectuals who met weekly to discuss the tenets of their new unifying idealistic philosophy of Logical Positivism. Gödel, along with Wittgenstein, each in their own ways, aided in dismantling this group with their unorthodox ideas. There are great sections in this book where Gödel's proposed notions of “Incompleteness” cause a great uproar amongst those seeking complete unifying theories to knit all of reality together. Gödel lived much longer than Turing, but ultimately died by starving himself to death both out of his paranoid notions of being poisoned and for other sad and errant reasons: there’s a passage in the book where Gödel delusionally claims that his refusal to eat is a proof of his free will, something he desperately wanted to believe in, along with the existence of an afterlife.

Turing and Gödel never met, but they were certainly aware of each other’s work and so the only way they collide in the book is in mentioning one another’s ideas.

Janna Levin is a physicist with a concentration in philosophy (her primary professional focus is cosmology but she had formal focus on philosophy as well, and I think it shows) yet on the stylistic level her writing is fantastic and surely shames huge numbers of authors who’ve workshopped their way through MFAs and maybe even published for years and years, while narrowly focused on literary fiction and nothing else. Janna Levin churns out steadily captivating prose that soars richly and exultantly without succumbing to a plummeted decadence; regularly supplanting ho-hum descriptions with a strikingly vivid lyricism through the conjuring of unusual imago-sensory crossbreeds that dance across the neural pathways with pleasantly assured aplomb.

The book is thoroughly researched as the notes provided at the back of the book further prove. It’s intellectually dexterous in its portrayals of these brilliant and flawed figures. The subjects (and the sort of human beings most tightly latched upon them) that are classically conceived of as cold and cerebral and arrogantly cocksure are sensitively imbued with the squirming life and heat of fallibility, frailty, confusion, and the portrayal of the true scientific spirit, where truth is provisional, and self-doubt and self-interrogation are constant companions.

While this is a book of heady ideas, it’s also a humanizing ode. The sections on Turing especially tugged the heartstrings. He was an odd but deeply sympathetic person. There are gripping descriptions of London being bombed by the German Luftwaffe, of Alan’s loneliness and tragic loss of his one true love as a schoolboy, and multiple gorgeous sections about the interconnectivity of things that just need to be read to be felt.

Both Turing and Gödel chased after the Truth with great fervor accompanied by great doubt. This classic yearning for the Truth of All Truths is maybe something many can easily set aside as not worth wasting time over when there is a more pressing desire for the Pursuit of Happiness on offer. I myself have often done this and will continue to do it. Hitting a wall where I no longer hunger for deep abstract truths about the nature of consciousness or reality or death, etc. But the desire never fully cools either. Also, even if one doesn't care at all about such cliché or high-minded foolishness, everyone knows what it’s like to yearn strongly for something Ideal, be it Romantic Love or the Perfect Career or the Perfect Artistic Creation and so on. As Olga Neurath says to Gödel about her and her husband finally accepting his Incompleteness Theorem:

"Your incompleteness theorem was hard for him to accept. It was hard for all of us, for every mathematician alive. But then Moritz always knew that it did not matter what he believed. What matters is the truth. And somehow you found it hidden where none of us could see. We all came to realize that mathematics is still flawless—no paradoxes, contradictions—just some truths that cannot be proven. Not so bad. We can live with that. He could live with that. [...] I myself worried from the start. Kurt, you worried us. It was hard for us for a time, to be sure. If not even arithmetic is complete, then what could we hope for from our philosophies, from our sciences, from the very things that were to be our salvation? The buoys that we clung—perhaps, I would admit now, with too much desperation—were taken away. [...] And here we are again with our hopes being crushed. I used to believe that when I was older I would come to some kind of conclusion, some calming resolution, and then the restlessness would end. I would know something definitive and questions would fade. But that will never happen. [...] We wanted to construct complete worldviews, complete and consistent theories and philosophies, perfect solutions where everything could find its place. But we cannot. The girls I hear playing in the park when I walk to the institute, our neighbor the old woman who will die soon, our own circle, we all prize a resolution, a gratifying ending, completeness and unity, but we are surrounded by incompleteness.

So I think that reading about the pursuit of Truth can still be moving and redemptive and nourishing for those who do not currently or never have really put much value on it. And then the journey becomes more valuable than the destination, as the ol' cliché reminds us.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was not a good book, which is a shame because the two scientists it speaks about, Alan Turing and Kurt Godel, are titans of 20th century thinking. Turing was highly influential in the development of computer science (and fought Nazis) while Godel is spoken in the same breathe as Aristotle and contributed some foundational theorems of math and logic. They also had extremely tortured existences (Turing because of his sexuality, Godel for metal health reasons) which would make an exploration of their lives very fascinating.
Unfortunately this book failed on all fronts.

First off the prose was so purple I was afraid its air passages had become blocked by its own sense of self importance.

In 1931 he [Godel] is a young man of twenty-five, his sharpest edges still hidden beneath the soft pulp of youth. He was just discovering his theorems. with pride and anxiety he brings with him this discovery. His almost, not-quite paradox, his twisted loop of reason, will be his assurance of immortality. An immortality of his soul or just his name? this question will be the subject of his madness. Can I assert that suprahuman longevity will apply only to his name? And barely even then. Even now that we live under the shadow of his name? And barely even that. Even now that we live under the shadow of his discovery, his name is hardly known. His appellation denotes a theorem; he's an initial, not a man. Only here he is, a man in defense of his soul, in defense of truth, ready to alter the vie of reality his friends have formulated on this marble table. He joins the Circle to tell the members that they are wrong, and he can prove it.

~~~

He [Turing] is uncomfortable and irritable, bloated with ideas. And something abrades him. His materialism escalates with these incredible epiphanies even as his awkward faith cloys and whines and nags him into misery. His materialism versus his faith. With a kind of morbid fascination, Alan stares at the brutal flaying of his beliefs with pity and a smudge of contempt for the loser. His own elaborate framework of spirit stacked on elements of matter, a frail house of cards that he easily blows apart

200 pages of this sort of writing will wear anyone down. The worst part is that the book barely even dips into the achievements of these men. We barely get a cursory explanation of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems and no explanation as to why it is important. Likewise we don't see any of the fruits of Turing's code breaking work or the consequences of his computer theories. A reader with no background knowledge of these men would be at a loss to explain why they mattered. Or, for that matter, why they are even in the same book. they make a passing reference to each other once or twice but it was as if the author stapled together a story about Turning and a story about Godel and decided to call the resulting mass of pages a novel.

Further, many of the events and happenings of the book the writer created out of whole clothe. Yes, she did draw upon their letters and writing, but so much of the book takes place in the minds of the men in question that I have a hard time considering this book historical fiction when so much of its substance is fabricated by the writer. There is just the barest framing of history around an imagined psychological profiling.

At the end of the day this book fails because the writing is ponderous, the story of the historical figures in question delved too deeply into the imagined working of their psyches instead of their contributions to the world, and the stories themselves bore little relation to each other. It was a mess of a book masquerading under the good name of the people it purports to examine.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is required reading in a first year writing seminar that I happen to be the librarian for, so I wanted to give it a try.

I know a lot more about Turing than Gödel or Wittgenstein, but the author does a decent job showing the parallels between the lives of Gödel and Turing, how their thinking intersects, and how each of them was influenced by Wittgenstein. The author herself is also in there occasionally, because she argues it makes no difference where the story begins.

"The world falls apart as we sit at the table passing everything over in silence." (attributed to Olga Hahn Neurath in the book)

"I am here in the middle of an unfinished story... We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy - a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that we were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us - funny and lousy and great all at once."

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I pondered a while what to say about this book until I realized it has its own review right there on the very last page:

1. Gödel, Kurt — Fiction

2. Turing, Alan Mathison, 1912-1954 — Fiction

3. Logicians — Fiction

4. Mathematicians — Fiction

5. Genius — Fiction

6. Philosophy — Fiction

7. Psychological fiction

So, everything is fiction. If this were true, you could just as well get rid of the word and suddenly nothing is fiction any more. I'd say this book works equally well as a work of fiction and non-fiction, and if you're interested in any or all of the above topics you should read it.

If that's not enough: There's also a little Wittgenstein bashing in there … all the more reason.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Khalid Abdul-Mumin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An awesome essay by a talented black hole physicist that reads like a memoir. Highly recommended.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are several fascinating things about this book. Levin avoids a lot of the mathy-math for the purposes of her narrative, and that was, no doubt, a good choice from a literary point of view. Rather, she presents the math in philosophical terms that are more palatable to the numerically challenged. I'm a logically inclined guy, but the vocabulary and grammar of math loses me just past Geometry or Algebra II. To this day, family members still occasionally chide me for not studying Calculus in school, to which I can only say they didn't study the Beat poets, the Romantics, or James Joyce.

"Oh, but Calculus is just a whole new way of looking at the world!" they insist.

"So is James Joyce," I reply, making what would be a devastating and definitive point in a world where wit and panache count for something. Unfortunately, in this world they make no difference whatever to those who aren't already so inclined. C'est la vie.

In that context, Madman Dreams is a kind of high, tragic Romance, or a Romantic Tragedy, depending on how one wants to look at it. "Romance" with a capital R. I've talked about the distinction between Romance and romance before, so I won't belabor the point other than to point to a thread that has such a discussion:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

It's also a Tragedy in the literary sense, and we haven't really talked about that here, so I'll muse for just a moment.

In brief, when you spill your $12 drink at a night club on a Saturday night, that's a tragedy (lower case t.) However, in literature Tragedy (capital T) means that in the end everybody dies. You can sometimes even rate a Tragedy by the body count. But characters dying off aren't quite enough. A Tragedy also has three main elements:

1. Usually the hero is some sort of royalty or nobility. These days this is often replaced by a leadership position.

2. An epic, national struggle that changes the world. This is almost always war, but it could be something like the intervention of the gods or some sort of massive natural disaster.

3. The otherwise undefeated hero is confronted by the situation that destroys him. (It's almost always a him, gentlegals/lads. That's changed a bit these days, of course, and there are important exceptions, but we're talking about very much pre-19th century literature here, and that's quite a boyz club.)

Royalty/nobility is less and less a factor this days. 20th Century literature did a lot to make Tragedy middle class. In that regard, Levin specifically talks about Turing's upbringing and how it transcended even his mentality. Rather than simply engage in a sexual encounter, for instance, he takes what might vulgarly be called a "rent boy" to lunch. They have an affair, not just sex. That's quite middle class, really. It's also his fatal flaw in the context of Tragedy. Turing's attitude toward his sexuality tracks as both modern, progressive and naive in a way that parallels his general social cluelessness. That somewhat vitiates the progressive or modernity of the attitude in several ways, but it also points out the essence of it in a way that would take a whole 'nother novel to describe.

The box for Tragedy Quality #2, of course, is ticked by WW2, and in that sense I'll just note that for me the most poignant part of the novel was Levin giving a speculative version of how Turing's efforts as a code breaker influenced the outcome of the war not in the abstract but in the personal experiences of the very men who arrested and charged him after the war. He saved them with his ideas and efforts. They persecuted him with judgement and self-righteous social standards. For just a few paragraphs, Turing becomes Christ-like in a way that I can only say I wish those who call themselves Christians these days would recognize, and that also references that third quality of Tragedy. Turing is killed not just by his affair or by the state, but by his forthright attitude and innocence. He could simply have lied to the police. He could have ignored the robbery. He could have called on some of his contacts in the government. He could have done any number of things that would have avoided his fate. But none of those things were in his nature to do.

It's also history. Levin fictionalizes the history in her account in several cases for the sake of brevity and character, but where someone like Gore Vidal might turn some intellectual backflips to justify his literary changes to the historical record in his Lincoln (I'm remembering an interview I saw with Vidal back in the day in which he argues that historical "facts" are all essentially in doubt, blah, blah, blah...) Levin annotated hers in a nice, neat list, sometimes explaining her motivation. Kudos to the author on that one.

For me, Kurt Gödel is much more difficult to get a handle on. I don't relate to his need for mothering, for instance, and I just can't wrap my head around his mental disorders. Rejecting food? Food? Are you fucking kidding me? That's as alien to me as... well, aliens, I guess. His reasoning when it comes to math make that all the more awkward because I assume things are ultimately unknowable, and I probably would have found Wittgenstein's assertion (in a fictional argument/debate with Turing, IRRC) that "I don't have a point!" not only as a rhetorical flourish, but at it's face value and gone on my merry way unperturbed.

I have compared this book to The Professor and the Madman and I do think that comparison holds up, though the fundamental difference is that Winchester is a journalist in that case. Levin has worked as a journalist, or a "science writer" if you will, but she's definitely written a novel here. There was, apparently, some discussion of what this book was when it was published, but I don't think there's really much question. Her fictionalization does come from research, but there's too much internal monologue and speculative characterization to say this is anything other than a fictionalization of history. It may be "true fiction" if one wants to get all quibbly and semantic about it, but there's no way it could really go into a non-fiction section of a bookstore.

The faults of the book are, IMO, where Levin inserts herself into the story. Several sections are in the first person; a whole paragraph at one point, and inserted into the narration in a couple of others. Every one of those took me out of the book and read as interruptions rather than insertions. I think she was going for a kind of tie to the contemporary there in order to associate the story with herself in those sections, and in doing so, connecting it up with the reader. Her subjects were, after all, very strange guys, and I suspect she thought they needed some sort of ambassador.

But I don't think they did. Sure, it's hard to really understand the mind of someone who is autistic (probably) or that of someone so determinedly paranoid that he starves himself to death if one is not personally experienced with either of those kinds of mental disorders, but Levin did it as well as I can imagine it being done, and I don't think we needed a guide. On the other hand, I may be reading too much into that insertion. I suspect it may, in fact, have been how she herself digested the lives of her subjects, and she included it for the sake of full disclosure in the same way she annotated her fictionalized aspects of the historical record.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a strange and fascinating/disturbing book--a work of fiction, but based on the real life stories of the great mathematician, Kurt Godel, and the father of computers, Alan Turing. The author, Janna Levin, is an astrophysicist trained at Cornell--but the writing is that of a mystic. The narrator is never named, but I take him/her to be the persona of Levin, who shares both the genius and madness of the two brilliant, self-destructive men at the center of the work.

All three of them--the two men and the author--are searching for the meaning of life. Like most of us, they want The Answer--why are we here and what does life mean? Godel's "incompleteness theorems" said that not even mathematics is provable, while Turing solved the German Enigma code with his belief that we humans are basically machines. One of the most powerful sentences in the book says, about humans: "We are not much. We are confused and brilliant and stupid, lost clumps of living ash."

The book is a powerful example of the dangerous line between genius and insanity--and it's a very thin line. Godel was a close friend of Einstein, who had died in 1955, but Godel died in 1978, literally starving to death from paranoia about being poisoned. Turing was a homosexual who was discovered in 1952 when the condition was considered illegal in England. He had the choice of prison or chemical castration and chose the latter, but the effects were so devastating that he took his own life in 1954, eating a cyanide-laced apple ("Snow White" had been one of his favorite stories).

Levin gives her own point of view so poignantly and powerfully when she says: "We are all caught in the stream of complicated legacy--a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that we were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us--funny and lousy and great all at once."

She CARES so much--about Godel, about Turing, about us. That's a rare quality, especially coming from a professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia. I wish she'd just left off the notes at the end--they're short and rather jumbled and not necessary. I'm just grateful to have experienced both the brilliance and brokenness of two unique men as seen through the words of someone with great compassion.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maria Popova waxed lyrical about it, and I do love historical fiction, especially about science (currently bingeing on all things Andrea Barrett) but I just couldn't get into this. The language was trying to be lyrical, I think, but was instead impenetrable and abstract.

[rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

If speculative fiction about the lives of persons so unconventionally brilliant (or brilliantly unconventional) that their brains can't sustain sanity is your bag, then you will enjoy this one as much as I did. Alan Turing didn't wash his pants; Kurt Gödel starved himself to death to show that individual human will can override mechanical instinct. The book is little more than a character sketch of their mad genius. It is heavier on narrative than on philosophy, math, or science, to be sure. But I can't imagine one appreciating this book -- and these men -- if one is not also appreciative of or curious about the mathematical and philosophical concepts therein.

(And with that, I go back to reading Pretty Little Liars!)

[Jafar · Rating 3 out of 5]

My second book by the physicist Janna Levin. This one a novel. Levin and I share a morbid fascination with mad and tormented geniuses. By genius I don’t mean those who are just exceptionally brilliant. A lot of gifted people get called genius. But once or twice a century there comes someone like Kurt Gödel who makes other geniuses crap their pants. Einstein said that he bothered going to the office only so that he can talk to Gödel – and he wasn’t bullshitting. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems are considered by many to be the most important results in the entire history of mathematics. I once toiled for a few days and went through a simplified version of the proof of one of his theorems. It was a spine-chilling experience. I realized that I was glimpsing into the mind of not a human but a demigod.

Gödel’s first theorem says that in any consistent system there are always true statements that cannot be proven as true. (If they cannot be proven to be true, then how do we know they're true? I said genius, didn't I?) His second theorem can roughly be paraphrased as: if a system can be proven to be consistent, then it’s inconsistent. You see that I wasn’t entirely joking about him making others crap their pants. He literally shook the foundations of logic and mathematics and philosophy. I still wonder how logicians and mathematicians and philosophers can sleep after Gödel. Gödel also was a paranoid schizophrenic who starved himself to death. David Foster Wallace called him the Dark Prince of Mathematics.

Turing is the better-known genius. He broke the Enigma code during the Second World War and then laid the ground for computers. In a freak incident, he was discovered to be a homosexual. He was a genius and a hero who helped to turn the tide of the war, but he was put on trial and went through the humiliation of hormone therapy. He committed suicide.

I had high hopes for this book. Can Levin right well, especially for a theoretical physicist? Yes, but I didn’t see much point in her trying to fictionalize Gödel’s and Turing’s lives. If you don’t know these two, you won’t learn much from this book because Levin is busy trying hard to write a novel, not a biography or a book about their works. If you already know these two, then, well, you won’t learn much from this book.

[Tristan MacAvery · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit defeat. I testify to all and sundry that I am unworthy of completing this novel. Whatever it is that allows someone to plow through the angst, the detail, the writing thicker than insincere compliments in a vat of social climbers, I have it not. I love various passages of description: "The cafe appears in the brain as this delicious, muddy scent first, awaking a memory of the shifting room of mirrors second -- the memory nearly as energetic as the actual sight of the room, which appears in the mind only third." Brilliant! And after 50 pages of it, I collapsed.

In order to make this announcement of my capitulation, I had to rate the book; I gave it three stars to be as neutral to the overall ratings as possible. Indeed, I "liked it," as the rating suggests, but these days at least, I have no stomach for it. I am going to presume that my gravest error is expecting something to happen, when the vast majority of the writing seems to be for the purpose of evoking a particular mood, as if our physicist author is carefully arranging everything necessary for the moment when the superconducting supercollider reveals its framtosecond recreation of the Creation. Perhaps I'm merely impatient, or perhaps momentarily too stupid to grasp the subtleties properly. Mea culpa.

I bow, sincerely and without rancor or sarcasm, to Dr. Levin's genius. Perhaps I'll tackle this book again one day.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is most unusual.

Its storytelling is quite minimal as it paints in fast brush strokes the story of two geniuses of the 20th century: Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Both men never truly fit into their world. Gödel suffered from paranoia and spent time in a sanatorium. Turing was gay and also would have probably been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome today.

They each asked a great question of the 20th. Gödel asked if we can ever truly know for sure if something is truly true? (His answer was ‘no’.) Turing asked if humans were anything more than just complicated machines? (His answer was also ‘no’.)

This book explores the implications of such questions and answers in regards to God and faith. What I enjoyed most about this book was that it did not offer answers. The older I get the less interested I am in finding the “right” answers. I find myself much more interested in asking the “right” questions. I would recommend this book to anyone who shares a similar point of view.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to read this book for a second time when it was announced that the movie "The Imitation Game", which was based on the work on Alan Turing, would be released on December 25, 2014.

I bought this book after I saw the author, Jenna Levin, on the Colbert Report. I enjoyed it so much I even bought tickets to see her speak at a Perimeter Institute event held at the Waterloo Collegiate Institute on October 4, 2006. She's a cosmologist and an astrophysicist and she decided to write a book about real people (Alan Turing and Kurt Godel) based around real events but the book is a work of fiction. It's a plausible blend of fact and fiction.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before reading A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, a novel, I'd read two of Janna Levin's books: one on the history of LIGO, a project that was the first to "detect" gravitational waves via light, and another which is as much astrophysics primer as it is beautiful memoir-qua-epistolary. Her writing in the science community is unlike any other I've encountered. Her prose is poetic and brimming with playful, artful and carefully pored over language. It's a prose of someone who knows how to use language to engage and inspire a reader while maybe also teaching them something.

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is just as meticulously written, and as drinkably wonderful line-by-line as the other books I've read by her, but ultimately it falls a little flat as fiction. Here's why: we have as our protagonists Alan Turing and Kurt Godel. Two men working in the field of mathematics who never met but were aware of one another. As Levin puts them both into the same novel, a reader would expect there to be some narrative threads that link and tie them together, that the fiction would create spooky action at a distance between the two characters. Echoes and vibrations, whether literally in the "action" of the stories, or at least thematically, metaphorically, etc. But, to my mind, I don't think that connexion is there. I absolutely love novels that work on a multi-narrative level--and those different narratives don't need to have literal intersections, but there has to be something more to the telling that puts each story in conversation with the other throughout the work. Unfortunately, I just didn't get there with this book.

However beautifully written Levin's sentences are, the plot, characters and arc of the book feel stagnated and empty. Alan and Kurt don't really live on the page so much as they exist there in black and white text. If I ventured a guess, Levin struggled with how far to go into fictionalizing the everyday lives of these men--obviously in the bounds of fiction there's a risk in taking historical figures outside of their context and making them grotesque or absurd, but Levin plays safe with the lives of these two characters, and even seems to struggle with pacing where there are, toward the end of the novel, massive gaps in time where things have happened that we never see, such as Alan and his wife separating and Alan having a love affair with a male prostitute, which all happen outside of the book. Things are very slow in the first 3/4 of the book, then lightning fast in the close quarter. Again, I think much of this might come from the difficulty in being true to historical fact while painting fiction.

But this comes to a more concerning question: I'm not actually sure what the story Levin was trying to tell about these two men in this story. We get a bit of biographical information. We get a glimpse of the discoveries they made. But we don't really get a sense of who they were, what their discoveries meant, or how they changed the face of science, philosophy, mathematics, et. al. in the 20th century. The book just doesn't make an argument for its existence in the end. Which is a real shame because sentence-by-sentence, it's a really wonderful experience to read it.

[Kristin Pedder · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, I listened to an episode of Radiolab about breaker of the Enigma Code Alan Turing (http://www.radiolab.org/story/193037-...) and heard of this book through that. It turned up in my local Book Grocer store, which is an Australian book outlet that sells discounted books -- often those that have already had their time in other bookstores -- and was chuffed with the coincidence of such a find. Synchronicity is all the more exciting when it comes with a discount.

To say that Janna Levin is a person of many talents is an understatement of her expertise -- fiction author AND professor of physics and astronomy, with right and left brain power to boot. She has her own website so you can also swoon with admiration: http://www.jannalevin.com/index.htm

Levin's debut novel, which follows the lives and distant connections of brilliant mathematicians Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, is written with the eloquence and creative flair of an experienced author who utterly respects her readers. Levin is not interested in condescending readers with her own (nor Turings, nor Gödel's) superior intellect but encourages in them fascination and a curiosity to know more.

I was expecting this to be an average but interesting read, given its $10 pricetag, but it's actually a great and riveting read.

[Britta Böhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful novel about the lives of two masterminds of mathematics: Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel. The book eloquently portrays their very different, and yet strangely similar lives and at the same time renders an intimate picture of European science and culture before and after WWII. Although the two men never met, there lives and their thinking are deeply connected through the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
(Though not necessary some knowledge of Wittgenstein's philosophcal thinking helps to enjoy the book even more).

[Jlawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A striking parallel portrait of the intellectual highs, personal complexities, and deeply saddening ends of these two formidable twentieth century geniuses. The author herself is a professor of physics and astronomy, and the book, fiction but mostly based on fact, explores these two men's thoughts and painful lives via well-chosen and eventually tragic vignettes.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am in awe of those who understand mathematics as a language, one that is far more universal and precise than those we speak. Before reading this book, while I had a vague idea of who Kurt Godel was, I did not know why he was important. Now, I know that Gödel's most famous theorem is, at least to this lay person, that mathematics cannot answer every question and that it shook up the world. Alan Turing I knew more about, but only because I saw the movie Enigma and did a bit of research on him after seeing it. Turing is considered the inventor of the computer. This book moves back and forth between these two men, providing insight into their lives and their accomplishments.

Like many super geniuses, these two men did not fit well in society. Bother were socially clumsy, to say the least. Both had very few friends and were obsessed with mathematics. There earliest years were tortuous. Turing, who attended a private school, was brutally bullied because he was so very different. Goring was probably, among other things, an obsessive compulsive. He often thought he was being poisoned. He reminds me of the chess master Bobby Fisher.

Turing seemed to be doing well until his homosexuality was discovered and, despite his wartime heroics, he was convicted of violating the anti-homosexuality laws and chemically castrated. Those chemicals ruined a brilliant mind. Shame on society.

I really like this book. I enjoyed how the author compared and contrasted these two men and their brilliant minds.

[Bryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this a pleasure to read. The author has a delightful way of writing about two giants of the twentieth century, Alan Turing and Kurt Godel. The writing has these surprising descriptive passages and nuanced emotional vignettes that are a joy to come across in and of themselves. I know just the gist of the implications of Turing's and Godel's work, but you wouldn't need to know anything necessarily to enjoy this book. It is so little addressed, that it seems too much to say that it is even indirectly involved. You could say they are tortured geniuses and leave it at that. When mathematicians and physicists work at this level, it is beyond my understanding, and much of it I have to take on faith. So the grand discoveries of these two men almost seems to cross over into more of a spiritual realm. Their work has a strangeness and, particularly Godel, a paradoxical thorniness that evokes mystery as much as it does clarity. Levine draws out the emotional landscape of these two men. She does touch on their work. It leaves me feeling that they were wrestling with what is knowable. Godel proved mathematics can't answer everything. This gave him some hope that men and women will always have free will. Turing was convinced that machines could reach a level of intelligence equal to human beings, which then puts free will into question. These were deeply troubled men. Levin treats them with great care and compassion.

[Avinash · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is frankly surprising that this genre of writing about historical figures isn't more popular. Author Janna levin talks about two geniuses of pre WWII era Kurt Godel and Alan Turing who share not only their brilliance and once in a century contributions to mathematics and logic, but also their delusional and tragic endings. But the author doesn't merely stick to stating well known facts in a sort of book keeping fashion but blends facts with fiction where the reader feels being walked through the lives of these two geniuses. I am aware of the tragedies these two went through in their lives but only after reading this book it "actually hit me" what they went through.

Some of my favorite passages:
1) "We are not much. We are confused and brilliant and stupid, lost clumps of living ash."
2) Turing when breaking off his engagement with Joan quotes Oscar Wilde, who shares a similarly tragic life story to Alan Turing:
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some do it with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave one does it with a sword.

[Bengisu KOCAOĞLU · Rating 4 out of 5]

Çünkü bazı doğrular, kurallara bağlı kalarak asla kanıtlanmaz./Mantık, ezelden beri vardır ve bize evrenin nasıl başladığını zorla kabul ettirir; sonsuza dek geleceğe de uzanır, kaderimiz mantığındaki kaçınılmaz kurallarıyla çoktan yazılmıştır./ Matematik göze hitap eder, kuşağa değil./ Dünya, olup biten her şeydir; Dünya, olguların toplamıdır./ Bunun doğruluğunu ona bakarak değil, onun hakkında düşünerek doğrulayabilirim./ “O bu dünyadır. Etmen figürler ve havadan figürler. Öyle iç içe geçerler ki, doğrusu, Adele, doğrusu, gerçek olan ile olmayanı birbirinden ayırt etmek her zaman çok kolay değildir. Ama bu dünyanın ötesinde başka bir dünya daha var.”/ Üzerine konuşamadığımız şeyler hakkında susmamız gerek./ Aslında söze dökülemeyecek şeyler vardır. Bunlar kendilerini belli ederler. Mistik olan şey bunlardır./ Matematik kusursuzdur. Ama eksiksiz değil. Bazı doğruları görmek için dışarıda durup içeriye bakmanız gerek./ Pek önemli bir şey değiliz. Şaşkınız, parlak zekalı ve aptalız, yitik, canlı kül yığınlarıyız./ İnsanların talep ettiği ilgi, işleri aksatır./Mesele, düşüncenin makineleştirilebilir olması değil. Düşünce zaten makineleşmiş durumda. Beyin zaten bir makinedir. Biyolojik bir makine./“O kadar acayipti ki komik oldu, o kadar komikti ki neredeyse addedilebilirdi./ Alan, milyarlarca parçacıktan oluşan uçsuz bucaksız bir sistemde sadece parçacıklardan biridir./Bu hikaye başladığı yerde bitecek, yani ortada.

Bana göre felsefik bir kitaptı çünkü daha önce böyle kitaplar okuduğum söylenemez. Kitap güzel birşey anlatıyordu; iki matematikçinin hayatını ve bilmediğimiz birçok şeyi. Benim hoşuma gitmeyen daha doğrusu alışık olmadığım ve kafamı karıştıran tek şey tarih sıralamasının karışık olarak yapılması ve bu iki ayrı adamı karışık olarak anlatması . Araya zaman girmeyerek ve odaklanarak okunması gereken bir kitaptı çünkü bazen kimin hayatına geçtiğini bile anlamakta zorlanıyorsun. Sonlara geldiğimde çoğu şey oturmuştu ama bunun için biraz zaman geçti.

[Miriam · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is the worst of both worlds--biography and fiction. It doesn't go into their theories in much detail, so it's not that much fun for a novice. You're not really going to pick up understanding from this. And it's not a good story, because it's just two guys, living their lives, as she picks out details and tries to pin them together. Like they both saw Snow White and ate apples. Or that they knew of each other's work. Or they had tragic ends. But it's not good fiction, either, because it's just a series of biographical sketches and then a narrator who's like "writing this book is hard" a couple of times. I need to stop getting sucked in by the back of the book, telling me it's going to intertwine things. Also, Godel didn't dream of Turing machines, if he's the madman. And for all of her sensitivity to their stories, calling anyone a "madman" seems mean.

Her use of language is odd. There were some sentences I reread a bunch of times and still couldn't make sense of. A lot of undefined pronouns and some unconventional uses of words and many tense shifts. It's a bumpy ride.

[Gabriela Ventura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Como romance o texto de Janna Levin não se sustenta. O livro parece mais a junção de dois perfis (romanceados, que seja) de dois grandes gênios atormentados - Gödel e Turing - do que de fato ficção histórica.

Ainda assim, a autora - ela própria, cientista - nos leva com graça para dentro de duas histórias de obsessão, amor pela matemática e consequências trágicas. É bastante interessante e, às vezes, comovente.

E como eu comprei esse livro numa banquinha de sobras a dez reais, não estou reclamando. Inclusive recomendo.

[Maryam AL_Oraij · Rating 5 out of 5]

This world extends beyond this room, Adele. There are the streets of Vienna and beyond that Europe and beyond that a globe in space in orbit around a star in a universe.
But how do I know that for sure? I cannot see the globe spinning on its axis right now as I speak to you. How can I be sure? I can be sure because it's logical; the mathematics is sound and respected by the orbits of the planets. I can verify it's true, not by looking at it, but by thinking about it.
Amazing Janna ()

[Dipanshu Gupta · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s funny to read a ficto-reality book on two of the most interesting topics relevant to contemporary science’s biggest hype - General Artificial Intelligence. It was kind of a fun book to read, but I did not get much out of it. It falls between an entertaining and didactic read.

The prose structure was different and the narrative style was quite fresh. It’s one of those book you would recall later and say, “Ah, I remember reading that book. It’s okay”.

[Sydney Doidge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally I liked this book and the concept of it. But I wanted WAY more math! She really didn’t explain their work in detail and why it was important. It focuses more on their isolated and lonely stories, fascinating for sure, but pure conjecture as to their exact thoughts and feelings. Maybe if I had know going in I would’ve liked it better but I thought I would get a much greater understanding of their work than just how tragic Alan Turing and Kurt Godel were.

[Luke Spooner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I became aware of this book because Patti Smith recommended it, and she rarely leads me astray, but I was initially pretty disappointed. At first I found the writing wooden and kind of uninspired. Ignorantly, I thought 'this is why scientists shouldn't write fiction'. It really shifts half way through becoming poetic and profound. The passage describing Turing's suicide was predictably heartbreaking but still kind of beautiful. What a fucking crime.

[Harsha Kokel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a page turner. It is the best science-history fiction I have ever read. Author does a great job narrating parallel lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel. The narration is fantastic and consuming. I absolutely loved how she puts herself in the book as well. The way she projects the characters from the book in her 21st century day-to-day experience hits me close to home.

[Laurey Steinke · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the descriptions are vivid, and transport one to the time between the World Wars and during World War Two, one wonders at the probity of the visualization of the autistic mind. Not at all sure that the historical characters in the book thought or felt anything like their fictional counterparts, and the pieces don’t hang together very well.

[Shad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really captured my imagination. Hard to put down.