In Jana Levin’s book, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, there are two main characters, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. Levin walks through their lives and discusses the turmoil that the two men go through. In the end, both men end up committing suicide. Kurt Godel died by malnutrition and Alan Turing died because of self-induced poisoning (Levin). Another man that lived out a life similar to Turing and Godel is an engineer by the name of Edwin Armstrong. Armstrong died by jumping from a window on the thirteenth floor of his apartment (Tsividis). A common theme that can be found is that these men’s suicides can be attributed to social psychological factors.
According to psychologist Gordon Allport, social psychology is a type of psychology that …show more content…
Behaviors such as aggression, self- harm, and abuse of drugs or alcohol are also potential symptoms” (Pataki). Throughout each man’s life you see him expressing several of these …show more content…
Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in London, England. (“Alan Mathison Turing”). In the time while Turing was growing up, England was involved heavily in foreign issues. In 1914, Archduke Fanz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia. This sparked conflict on the international level. Austria- Hungary declared war on Serbia one month after the assassination. Great Britatin warned Germany that they couldn’t stay neutral and so Germany declared war on France. Great Britain then ordered their troops to mobilize, thus entering Turing’s home country into one of the biggest wars in the history of the world, World War I. The war lasted from July 28, 1914 until November 11, 1918 (World War I). According to Princeton University, the total number of casualties in World War I, both military and civilian, was about 37 million: 16 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes 9.7 million military personnel and about 6.8 million civilians (“World War I Casualties”). Turing would have been a developing child during this time, watching the chaos evolve around him. This would have been a very negative environment for him to experience and the social psychological atmosphere would have been very dark and not optimistic. World War I was the first cause of his childhood posttraumatic stress