A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Download or read book A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines written by Janna Levin and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems sent shivers through Vienna’s intellectual circles and directly challenged Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dominant philosophy. Alan Turing’s mathematical genius helped him break the Nazi Enigma Code during WWII. Though they never met, their lives strangely mirrored one another—both were brilliant, and both met with tragic ends. Here, a mysterious narrator intertwines these parallel lives into a double helix of genius and anguish, wonderfully capturing not only two radiant, fragile minds but also the zeitgeist of the era.