Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou and Alecos Papadatos.
Requirements: CBR Reader, 307 MB.
Overview: An innovative, dramatic graphic novel about the treacherous pursuit of the foundations of mathematics.
- Logicomix is a comic / graphic novel written by Apostolos Doxiadis and the famous theoretic computer scientis Christos Papadimitriou.
It tells the story of the so-called "foundational quests" of modern mathematics in an very personal and enjoyable way. Main protoganist is Bertrand Russel, one of the most notable logicians of the last century.
This exceptional graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel, and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal—to establish unshakable logical foundations of mathematics—continues to loom before him. Through love and hate, peace and war, Russell persists in the dogged mission that threatens to claim both his career and his personal happiness, finally driving him to the brink of insanity.
This story is at the same time a historical novel and an accessible explication of some of the biggest ideas of mathematics and modern philosophy. With rich characterizations and expressive, atmospheric artwork, the book spins the pursuit of these ideas into a highly satisfying tale.
Probing and ingeniously layered, the book throws light on Russell’s inner struggles while setting them in the context of the timeless questions he spent his life trying to answer. At its heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict between an ideal rationality and the unchanging, flawed fabric of reality.
Genre: Comics, Education, History, Mathematics,
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
- Alecos Papadatos artist
Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou writer
Dimitris Karatzaferis, Thodoris Paraskevas inker
Anne Bardy letterer
Annie Di Donna colours
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Bloomsbury USA, 2009.
- Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth is a graphic novel about the foundational quest in mathematics, written by Apostolos Doxiadis, author of Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture, and theoretical computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou of the University of California, Berkeley. Character design and artwork are by Alecos Papadatos and color is by Annie Di Donna. The book was originally written in English, and was translated into Greek by author Apostolos Doxiadis for the release in Greece, which preceded the US and UK releases.
Set between the late 19th century and present-day, the graphic novel Logicomix is based on the story of the so-called "foundational quest" in mathematics.
Logicomix intertwines the philosophical struggles with the characters’ own personal turmoil. These are in turn played out just upstage of the momentous historical events of the era and the ideological battles which gave rise to them. The narrator of the story is Bertrand Russell, who stands as an icon of many of these themes: a deeply sensitive and introspective man, Russell was not just a philosopher and pacifist, he was also one of the prominent figures in the foundational quest. Russell’s life story, depicted by Logicomix, is itself a journey through the goals and struggles, and triumph and tragedy shared by many great thinkers of the 20th century: Georg Cantor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, Alfred North Whitehead, David Hilbert, Gottlob Frege, Henri Poincaré, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing.
A parallel tale, set in present-day Athens, records the creators’ disagreement on the meaning of the story, thus setting in relief the foundational quest as a quintessentially modern adventure. It is on the one hand a tragedy of the hubris of rationalism, which descends inextricably on madness, and on the other an origin myth of the computer.
- Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth / Apostolos Doxi, Reviewed by thecomicscove on Jan. 11, 2012.
- I looked at the premise of Logicomix with more than a little bit of apprehension, particularly when I finally figured out what that premise was. Essentially, it’s the story of Bertrand Russell’s meticulously academic and logically reasoned justification of the pacifism for which he eventually became famous. A little bland, I admit, but not an altogether unfit story for a comic book.
And if it had simply been presented as that, I might have less ambivalence toward the book.
Presented as a "story within a story within a story"–that’s right, there are three different narrative frameworks going on in this story–Logicomix makes constant self-referential comics creation methods, even as it debates and deconstructs them within the frameworks of logic, philosophy and mathematics through its characters’ and creators’ observations. At the outermost frame, we have the creators, Apostolos, Christos, Alecos, Annie, and Anne, a researcher, discussing the specifics of the comic: Russell’s life, his work, and the people he encounters. They often argue and debate one another during the "comic’s" creation, often about what the significant morals, points, and themes of the story should be. Bertrand Russell’s lecture, the next story framework, directly informs the third, which is his narration of his lifelong quest to provide an indubitable foundation for mathematics and the people he encounters during his quest to do so.
At over 300 pages, this is certainly an ambitious story, and one that, I fear, takes too long to reach its conclusion, make its point, and wrap things up. I’m not one to propose that action and adventure must be the only things we see in comics, but I do believe that if you’re going to write a narrative of such significant length in a sequential art format, then you’d better have a way to hold your readers’ interest and keep them wanting to know what happens next. If you can’t do that, you’ll end up with a thick tome that’s not good for much more than a paperweight.
Is that what Logicomix is? Not to me, though I will qualify that I was significantly less interested in reading this than I typically am of most comics. It was educational, which I think was its saving grace, but I’m not sure how it will hold up for most readers. The art is fairly simple and not particularly stellar, though it works well enough for the premise of a comic essentially about the logical justification for pacifism in the face of war.
While it has more than a few of its own flaws, it’s not a bad read. It’s also, by the same token, not a great read. Not having been previously familiar with Russell’s life or works, I found it at least educational and informative, although the constant interruptions to the multiple narratives were both off-putting. The introductions of multiple philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians in Bertrand’s life with whom I was not familiar was also a little taxing, though I will acknowledge that as more my problem than the narrative’s, as the creators were at least thoughtful enough to include them and many concepts in Logicomix in a glossary at the end of the book.
With all that said, I won’t claim this as particularly gripping or fun material. It’s interesting in places, but I’m not sure that will be enough to keep lovers of traditional comics reading. Recommended, but with reservations.
Interesting and very different, Reviewed by P. Wung on July 25, 2009.
- I am a big fan of Doxiadi’s book on Goldbach conjecture: Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession.
This book is very different, in manifold ways. The previous book was a novel wrapped around a mathematical idea. In the process of telling a story, Doxiadis explained the mathematical problem. It was pretty straight forward – not the problem, the approach. But this book is a tutorial on logic, a historical review of the most dramatic development in logic, a chronological synopsis of how higher mathematics, philosophy and logic became intertwined and coupled. AND, the book did this in a comic book format. The approach is, of course very ambitious. The question then is: was it successful?
This may seem cowardly, but it does echo the book’s conclusion: it is really up to the reader.
The book poses the question early on: pure logic will lead a rational person to a right conclusion to a difficult moral problem, in this case, whether Britain should enter into WWII against Hitler. The entire book then is predicated upon the literary mechanism to introduce a wide spanning discourse on the development of 20th century logic, the narrative is taken through all of its twists and turns by the narrator in the form of Bertrand Russell, with occasional self referencing vignettes of the writing and drawing teams of this book.
Russell is a natural choice, and his life in the higher altitude work in philosophy and mathematics really fits in nicely with the history of the logical arguments. His work, Principia Mathematica – Volume One with Lord Whitehead was also seminal in much of the breakthroughs that followed. The narratives are carried on through conversations with some of the most colorful people in the European philosophical, and mathematical intelligentsia: Frege, Cantor, Wittgenstein, the Vienna, Hilbert, Poincare, and Godels. But, relying on the words of these heavy hitters to carry through the dense and complex ideas is a difficult proposition for the reader because the heavy hitters tend also to have heavy and dense writings, so the authors have thoughtfully provided brief respites featuring the comic book counterparts of the actual writers and animators working on the book, and a welcome respite it is, this mechanism saved the readers from some heavy duty mental headaches and gnashing of teeth.
So, after all that work, we return to the original question: were the authors successful? I think they were, by and large, but once again, it is up to the reader to decide because the depths to which the message is delivered depends very much on the reader’s depths of understanding of the problems described and the reader’s familiarity with the literature. The tutorial on the philosophical works, particularly the Principia and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Routledge Classics) was very good, the authors did manage to explain some very important and dense material very cleanly and concisely. As for resolving the central problem, actually the argument used to present all this philosophy was not so successful, but that is the nature of a philosophical discourse: most of them end without a black and white conclusion.
The book is very ambitious, it attacked a very large and complex piece of human thought by using a very untraditional means – the format nostalgically brought back to the days when I was religiously reading Classic Illustrated comic books when I was in my youth- it did a magnificent job of relaying the author’s intent.
Download Instructions:
http://gestyy.com/wLQdSn — Logicomix, An Epic Search for Truth (2009)
- Mirror:
- http://novafile.com/zaibpc2i7mqz — Logicomix, An Epic Search for Truth (2009)
http://gestyy.com/wLQdST — Logicomix, An Epic Search for Truth (2009)
