Journey to the Edge of Reason, by Stephen Budiansky (Norton).This expansive biography of the mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel places his achievements in their social and political context. Born in 1906, Gödel witnessed the flourishing of logical empiricism as a member of the Vienna Circle before joining a wave of brilliant European mathematicians who fled to universities in the United States. Budiansky evokes the protectiveness of Gödel’s colleagues in mordant detail (the logician Gerald Sacks said that speaking to Gödel was like talking to “a very bright eleven-year-old”). This community buoyed him in his later years, as he succumbed to the debilitating paranoia that had shadowed him for much of his life.
Projections, by Karl Deisseroth (Random House). This hybrid memoir, by an emergency-room psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and bioengineering,…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 28, 2021