A madman dreams of Turing machines

Kurt Godel and Alan Turing were two of the most prominent mathematicians of the twentieth century, but their desire for privacy means that it is hard for a biography to tell what they were really like. Janna Levin solves this problem by making clear that much of what she is writing is fiction. In A madman dreams of Turing machines she tells their stories.

Thus we hear of Turing's troubled life at school, at of Gödel's entry into the Vienna Circle, and of how well his ideas were accepted. The book goes on to tell of Turing's vital work during the World War II in decoding the Enigma machine code, and of the problems he faced due to his homosexuality, eventually resulting in his suicide. We find out about how Gödel's paranoia meant that it took great effort from his wife Adele to get him to eat anything, and how when she becomes too ill to feed him he gradually starves himself to death.

So how well does the fictional account work? I liked the way that Levin combined her own musings about the nature of reality with those of her partially fictional characters. Unfortunately I felt that this was overshadowed by more of the book being about the lives of two misfits - I wasn't so keen on this. Certainly if you want to find out a bit about Gödel and Turing's lives without having to plough through lots of maybe's then I would say that this book is close enough to reality to be worth reading.