Book Review

Finished A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin and thought it was OK.

Did you all know that Alan Turing was arrested in Britain for homosexual acts and chemically castrated? And that he committed suicide? I didn't. Did you know that Kurt Godel was so paranoid towards the end of his life that he didn't eat and died of starvation in 1978? I didn't.

Levin is a physicist at Columbia and does an interesting job of presenting a short biographical fiction of these two men - basically she combines actual events and real conversations with some fictional settings to paint a picture of the lives of both of these men over a period of about 50 years. It's an interesting approach and interesting too that she chose Turing and Godel since they had very different world views (Turing believed that humans were essentially computing machines, while Godel was famous for proving that there are some things in mathematics that we can't prove - thus can't be computed and we are more than just computing machines).

3/5 stars from me.