Specify Epithetical Books A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
| Title | : | A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines |
| Author | : | Janna Levin |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 230 pages |
| Published | : | August 22nd 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Philosophy. Science. Mathematics |
Janna Levin
Hardcover | Pages: 230 pages Rating: 3.68 | 1483 Users | 245 Reviews
Interpretation During Books 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 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 lives of two men. A story of genius and madness, incredible yet true.
Present Books Conducive To A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
| Original Title: | A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines |
| ISBN: | 1400040302 (ISBN13: 9781400040308) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award Nominee (2007), PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize (2007), Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work for Outstanding Fictional Work (2007) |
Rating Epithetical Books A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
Ratings: 3.68 From 1483 Users | 245 ReviewsJudgment Epithetical Books A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
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 aboutJanna Levin breathes life into her characters from a pen dipped in a magical, lyrical language. She dwells more on the humanity of her famous subjects than on their theorems, giving the reader an immediate intimacy with them. An amazing literary talent.
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
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
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
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 dont 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 wasnt bullshitting. Gödels Incompleteness Theorems are
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
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