In this remarkable work of fiction, astrophysicist Janna Levin reimagines the lives of two of the most important and influential minds of our time.<br /><br />The narrator is a scientist herself, a physicist obsessed with Kurt G&amp;#246;del, the greatest logician of many centuries, and with Alan Turing, the extraordinary mathematician, breaker of the Enigma Code during World War II. &amp;#8220;They are both brilliantly original and outsiders,&amp;#8221; the narrator tells us. &amp;#8220;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.&amp;#8221; Which she does in a haunting, incantatory voice, the two lives unfolding in parallel narratives that overlap in the magnitude of each man&amp;#8217;s achievement and demise: G&amp;#246;del, 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&amp;#8217;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.<br /><br />A unique amalgam of luminous imagination and richly evoked historic character and event&amp;#8212;<i>A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines</i>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.