Book Report: Logicomix

2. Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitrou, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, with art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna (2009) (1/9/26)

I've had this book quite a long time, so when I began searching for an L book, it jumped out and said, me me me! I'm entertaining, and since I'm mostly drawings, I'll be quick! 

Well, yes: quick, but also weighty, because this book covers some confounding mathematical—or rather, logical—foundations. It begins on September 9, 1939, three days after Hitler invaded Poland and on the day Britain declared war on Germany, with a lecture the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell gave on "the role of logic in human affairs." Though as he explains at the end, in the Q&A, in fact it's not a lecture so much as a story, "a story of a man who hoped to find a way of getting absolutely right answers." It includes meetings and conversations with major mathematical innovators, such as Gottlob Frege, the greatest logician since Aristotle, and Georg Cantor, the creator of the mathematical theory of infinity. He recounts the clash between Henri Poincaré and the German David Hilbert on the relative power of intuition vs. proof in mathematical thought. Wittgenstein and Gödel make appearances. It is also a story of madness, of conflict, of frustration, and ultimately, Russell said, of failure. And yet. 

It's a heady mix that I am ill-equipped to summarize here. The narrative also includes the very making of this book, in a wink at self-referentiality—the discussions the authors had as they walked around Athens hashing out the themes; and there's also a framing story involving Aeschylus's drama Oresteia, for a humanitarian twist. 

Doxiadis explains the project better than I can:

And here's a video about the making of the book:

It's a book I may pick up again—and slow down to really consider the philosophical components. I believe they're well explained. But this time, I just wanted to find out "what happened," and to admire the wonderful graphics. 

In this scene, Russell and a younger Wittgenstein compare takes on the world:

For me, for sure, Logicomix is better than reading Russell himself, who took 362 pages to prove that 1+1 = 2!

And if you want a real review of the book, I would send you to this one in the New York Times.