Serendipity35

If Alan Turing was a kid in an American school today, he would definitely be classified in some way. Still, he was a genius who is generally credited with developing some of the basic concepts underlying the computer.

Kurt Gödel was a fearful, reclusive kid who became a paranoid adult. Where were the special services people and child study teams for these two? Gödel was a mathematical genius.

I first heard author Janna Levin interviewed on NPR. She is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her scientific research concerns the early universe, chaos, and Black Holes. In this book, she puts these two geniuses together in a way that stays mostly in non-fiction but allows some slight fictionalization of their lives.

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machinesstarts in Nazi Germany and passes over several decades bringing them to the United States.

The two never do meet up, though they know about each other. Their lives are not happy ones - loneliness, isolation, introspection, failed relationships.

The book's publisher describes it this way:

"A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines bridges fiction and nonfiction to tell a strange if true story of coded secrets, psychotic delusions, mathematical truth, and lies. This story of greatness and weakness, of genius and hallucination, is based on the parallel lives of Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of many centuries, and Alan Turing, the extraordinary code breaker during World War II. Taken together their work proved that truth is elusive, that knowledge has limits, that machines could think. Yet Gödel believed in transmigration of the soul and Turing concluded that we were soulless biological machines. And their suicides were complementary: Gödel, delusional and paranoid, starved himself to death fearing his food was poisoned. Turing ate a poison apple, driven to suicide after being arrested and convicted of homosexual activities. These two men were devoted to truth of the highest abstract nature, yet were unable to grasp the mundane truths of their own lives. Through it all, the narrator wonders, along with these two odd heroes, if any of us can ever really grasp the truth."

In an online interview, Levin says about Turing and Gödel:

Alan Turing is most famous for breaking the German Enigma code during World War II. But among scientists, he's best known for pure mathematical discoveries inspired by Kurt Gödel's greatest work.

Taken together their work proves that there are fundamental limits to what we can ever know. In the wake of this massive blow to knowledge, Turing invents the computer.

So here they converge on some phenomenal truth about numbers but then diverge completely in their worldviews - Turing becomes an atheist who believes we are no more than soulless biological machines and Gödel believes in reincarnation of a soul. And then their suicides are bleakly complementary - Gödel starves himself to death in a paranoid delusion that his food is poisoned and Turing intentionally eats poisoned food, an apple, straight out of Snow White. I said you can't make this stuff up.

It's an interesting tale. I don't think the author is trying to equate madness with genius, though you could reach that conclusion. Something the book does use is the Liar's Paradox. The liar says, "This is a lie." That self-referential statement actually influenced Gödel's and Turing's mathematical discoveries. Levin says that she "needed to be in the book to tell the lies that lead to the true story, the fiction that's fact."

Why does Turing get top billing in the title? Is it that he built upon Gödel's work? Is it b ecause we are so consumed by computers now? The Turing machines of the book's titles, though often called the earliest computers, would disappoint most students as computers.

Confession: I actually didn't pick up the book until I saw her interviewed on Comedy Central and she talked about the book with Stephen Colbert who asked if he might be a Turing machine. The answer is yes.