Reviewed by

Why would a psychologist be interested in A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, a book about two mathematicians written by a theoretical physicist? Well, consider that the physicist, Janna Levin, has proved herself able to write clever, imaginative explanations of the most abstract theoretical ideas and that no mathematicians have had more impact on science in general, and psychology in particular, than Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Consider further that both mathematicians were fascinated by the Snow White story, that one of them was probably paranoid and starved himself to death, and the other was homosexual and committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple, and one has all the ingredients of a great psychological drama. The Roman philosopher Seneca said, “There is no great genius without some touch of madness. ” Two thousand years of attempts to verify this assertion have had limited success (see Waddell, 1998). In recent years, though, there seems to have been a particular attempt to associate madness with mathematicians. Sylvia Nasar's (1998) A Beautiful Mind described how a schizophrenic mathematician won a Nobel Prize. David Auburn's (2001) Proof explored the connection between mathematical genius and bipolar disorder, and Mar