A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is a 2006 book by Janna Levin that contrasts fictionalized accounts of the lives and ideas of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. The book won several awards, including the PEN/Bingham Fellowship Prize for Writers and the MEA Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work. It was also a runner-up for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Description
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines contrasts fictionalized accounts of the lives and ideas of the 20th-century mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, who never met in reality.In an interview with Sylvie Myerson in The Brooklyn Rail, Levin said of her book: "There was a lot that made me want to write it as a novel, one being this whole idea that sometimes truth cannot come out as a theorem even in mathematics, let alone in a retelling of two people's lives. Sometimes you have to step outside of the perfect linear logic of biographical facts."