Will I love Logicomix?

When I saw this book, translated into English in 2009, I was very skeptical. I’d never enjoyed a graphic novel, and even though I’d enjoyed math in school, I couldn’t imagine reading an entire book devoted to the history of the philosophy of mathematics.

But somehow the sheer audacity of what they had attempted made it catnip to me, and before I knew it, I’d inhaled the whole thing and felt high on the feeling that anything was possible. If this could be a graphic novel, I thought feverishly, couldn’t my old obsession, Maria Lani? If only I could find… show more.

In the mood for a graphic novel starring Bertrand Russell and a supporting cast of famous thinkers like Whitehead, Frege, Gödel, and Wittgenstein? Logicomix is for you!

Flip to Chapter Six, “Incompleteness,” for a peek of Vienna in the 1930s. The logic and philosophy illustrated throughout provide a great context for the work of Vienna’s famous philosophical circle led by Moritz Schlick, whose 1936 murder provides a chilling contrast to the intellectual pursuits of that time.

Logicomix is a revelation. It tells the colorful life stories of some incredibly important philosophers and mathematicians of recent times, how they met and how their lives reflect their thoughts about some of the most difficult questions ever posed. The stories are beautifully illustrated with a detail that conveys more than mere words. It feels wondrous how the most abstract ideas can be made comprehensible and captivating when we had only the vaguest notions about what these ideas even meant.

Logicomix is as entertaining, beautiful, and informative as it is surprising; it is a graphic novel about the foundations of mathematics. The book follows the philosopher, logician, and mathematician Bertrand Russell and his contemporaries like Georg Cantor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Hilbert, Gottlob Frege, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing as they try to create a solid structure of logic and set theory on which all of mathematics can be built. Although Logicomix is, strictly speaking, a novel, it stays close to the historical and mathematical truth, and at the end of the book the authors say precisely what liberties… show more.

Logicomix is an impossible book: a graphic novel about the foundational crisis in mathematics in the early decades of the 20th century. And if that sounds to you crazy, or boring, or contrived (as it did to me when I first heard about it) Doxiadis and Papadimitriou are here to prove you wrong. The book is absolutely beautiful, the artwork exquisite, and most importantly – the story is downright gripping. Once you’ve picked up Logicomix, chances are you will not put it down until you’ve read the whole thing, cover to cover. It’s just that good.

The book follows… show more.