Download Books For A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines Free Online

List Books Toward 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)

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Janna Levin

Hardcover | Pages: 230 pages

Rating: 3.68 | 1483 Users | 245 Reviews

Commentary Supposing 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.

Particularize Based On Books A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Title	:	A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
Author	:	Janna Levin
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 230 pages
Published	:	August 22nd 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf
Categories	:	Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Philosophy. Science. Mathematics

Rating Based On Books A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Ratings: 3.68 From 1483 Users | 245 Reviews

Evaluation Based On Books A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

(3.0) Characters and certainly mathematics are thin. We get the highlights of the quirks and personalities of Gödel, Turing and friends but feels artificial, like a stage play or something. Somewhat entertaining. Did not like the two or three pages by the 'narrator' in modern-day New York. Gimmicky, unnecessary. Also not entirely sure I see how the two narratives integrate together.The one exchange that I really liked in this is when Turing's friend (and secret fiancee, later to be snubbed),

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

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

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

Generally I liked this book and the concept of it. But I wanted WAY more math! She really didnt 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 wouldve 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.

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

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.