Logicomix

Logicomix, the story of Bertrand Russell's struggles with philosophy

and his sanity.

A story within another. A novel form of comic. An essay that fits
in a fairy tale.

Following the trail of the founders of Reason, a group in modern
Athens delegate to Bertrand Russell as a guide, leaving him to guide us
to an era that marked the history of science - and beyond.

Against a background of war and the absurdity of the power of ideas
and, above all, persons behind them, pulling the strings in a story where the "craze for logic"
tends to infinity. Bertrand Russell, hero, takes the floor and leads us into a world where
paranoia lurking around every corner. From his childhood and adulthood until the age of
scientific work and its intersection with the legends of science, history of logic unfolds as a
series of paradoxes.

The ideological ferment, spiritual burnout, the enthusiasm of success, the cancellation
before the deadlock, the desire for recognition and above all passion for absolute knowledge
color the characters of the book, giving birth to heroes like Frege, Hilbert The Poincare, the
Vitgkentstain the Gdel and Turing. Inspired notations unearth the deeper feelings and
mood swings them, shedding light on the man behind the scientist.

The Logicomix is a journey into the world of ideas. A dip in the human passions. A "tragedy
of the heroes of logic" that tried to fit his whole life in an equation.
The book is the brainchild of two Greek men. Apostolos Doxiadis, 55, is hell-bent on
bridging the gap between science and the arts: he's a
mathematician but also a translator, actor, writer and
movie director.
His third novel, Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture,
was an international bestseller, published here by Faber &
Faber. He once devised a shadow-puppet musical about
Jackson Pollock, and wrote a play called Seventeenth
Night about the theorems of Kurt Godel. His collaborator
on the Russell project is Christos Papadimitriou, a
professor of computer science at Berkeley, California; Bill
Gates is among his former pupils.




Logicomix
An article from Independent, Wednesday 02 September 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/bertrand-russell-the-
thinking-persons-superhero-1780185.html
The subject of the newest comic-strip sensation, though, might still raise eyebrows:
it's the story of the quest for the foundation of mathematics, starring and narrated by
Bertrand Russell, the British logician, philosopher, mathematician, reformer, pacifist,
activist, jailbird and chronic womaniser.
The book delves into Russell's past, his childhood and the first inklings of his search
for the certainties upon which maths, and therefore all science, ultimately rest.
It's an extraordinary piece of work: the arid title, Logicomix, seems to suggest a genre
of brisk, strip-cartoon guides to hard philosophy, like the popular Icon series (eg
Introducing Aristotle) instead of an absorbing 350-page narrative about how the
search for logic and first principles drove most of its practitioners round the twist and
threatened to do the same to the 3rd Earl Russell in the early 20th century.
Its great subject is the historical desire to make the world totally understandable by
reason, and it itches us inside the debate. Doxiadis and his team make us feel how
cataclysmic was the moment when Kurt Godel, the mathematician, in a lecture,
announced: "There will always be unanswerable questions," and proved that
arithmetic is "of necessity incomplete" pulling the rug from under the study of logic.
("It's all over," remarked Russell's friend Von Neumann at the conference, meaning
the whole of philosophical reasoning.) By the end, Russell tells listeners: "Take my
story as a cautionary tale, a narrative argument against ready-made solutions." It's
heartening that such sophisticated dialectics can survive a transition to the idiom of
Batman and The Simpsons.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Logicomix-Search-Truth-Apostolos-
Doxiadis/dp/0747597200/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251221815&sr=1-
1#reader_0747597200