Stand back, Spiderman. Back off, Batman. Comic books have a new hero with unexpected powers, and he isn't even imaginary. He's Bertrand Arthur William, the Third Earl Russell. To most Americans, Bertrand Russell is notorious for being an outspoken atheist long before the current crop of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and others. He was also a pacifist, and during the last decades of his long life he campaigned for nuclear disarmament. He makes his debut in comics, however, not for these causes, but for his work in the early twentieth century trying to make sure that mathematics was founded on irrefutable logic. If you think that seems an inauspicious or inappropriate topic for a comic book, you are simply wrong; _Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth_ (Bloomsbury) is consistently surprising, informative, and delightful. Authors Apostolos Doxiadis, a novelist who has worked mathematical themes into fiction, and Christos H. Papadimitriou, a computer science professor, working with Alecos Papadatos for art and Annie di Donna for color, have made a good-looking 350-page introduction to Russell's mathematical life as well as to basic mathematical ideas that he resolved, or failed to resolve. Don't worry if you didn't like math; these are realms of mathematics far above what you got in high school, and while none of us is going to understand them at Russell's level of understanding, _Logicomix_ provides clear introductions to them and shows why Russell and others were so passionately interested in nailing down all the truth they could.
The frame story is set in 1939, when Russell is in America, and England has just declared war on Germany. He gives a lecture which is a series of flashbacks on how he and others struggled with this very basic question. The lecture panels are in subdued colors, the flashbacks are somewhat brighter, and most colorful of all are the pages devoted to the authors and artists of the book itself, pondering how to show the ideas and arguing over themes and presentations. When Russell got to Cambridge, he found that mathematics was undermined by circular reasoning and intuition. Unshakable logical foundations were needed, and he determined that he himself would construct them and would build the mathematical edifice upon them. For a decade he labored with Alfred North Whitehead on _Principia Mathematica_, an attempt to weed out paradoxes. This was a work going back to fundamentals so deep that it takes the first 362 of its thousands of pages to get to the useful demonstration that 1 + 1 = 2. One of the people who read the book (to Russell's knowledge, the only person to do so) was Kurt Gödel, who was to show that Russell and Whitehead's goal was illusory; he mathematically proved that no logical system could capture all of mathematics, and that there would always be mathematical questions that could not be answered and mathematical truths that could not be proved. Russell's great quest turned out to be a failure, but it turned out to be a hugely productive one, as from the work of Gödel, Turing, and others profiled here, we do have a groundwork for mathematics and logic, only it is not at all the bedrock that Russell had set out to find. The search for truth here is not just Russell's but that of mathematicians through the centuries.
_Logicomix_ is good-looking, with glossy papers and a rich color scheme. The often witty pictures take every advantage of comic book art, with exaggerated perspective, elevated views, big-letter sound effects, and nightmares depicted as reality. Russell's story is a great one, and piquant when including details of his erratic and decidedly illogical love life. The book winds up with the authors and their crew going to a performance of Aeschylus's Oresteia that nicely sums up big themes of war, justice, madness, and wisdom that are within Russell's tale. I sincerely hope if you know anyone interested in comics or anyone with the slightest interest in mathematics or philosophy, or if you know a young person whose thoughts might turn that way, that you will ensure a copy gets into that person's hands.
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Spectacular book, perhaps not "like new" condition, however
An utterly stunning narrative retelling of the story of logicism, which, having grown up reading Russell's work, I know to be one of the most fascinating developments in the history of western thought. If you're curious about the foundations of mathematics, logic, or philosophy this is a story you must know. If you've studied the philosophy of mathematics or have never even heard of the project of its founding, this story will make for inspiring and elucidating reading. I love Russell's work, but I found many details of his life and work that hadn't heard.All this said, the copy I received, described as "Like New" would certainly pass as "Good" condition, or possibly even "Very Good." The internal pages appear as if nearly untouched. However, the same sadly cannot be said of the cover. Keep this in mind when buying from used sellers.In any case, I often feel that children make more earnestly and dispassionately inquisitive philosophers than those of their elder peers. The comic style plays into this perfectly, bringing out that inner, curious child in all of us. I hope it brings to you the same sense of wonder as the philosophy of mathematics has always brought about in me!
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Artikel wie beschrieben, schnelle Lieferung, alles ok
Reviewed in Germany on October 15, 2023
