Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

"The first is Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth . I got this because I was interested in graphic novels a long time ago, I was still in grad school, or even before. I found it really so remarkable on two levels. On one level it’s just a story about logicians. They’re looking for fundamental truths about the foundational quest in mathematics, which people in the 1930s were really concerned with. But, at the same time, if you look at the language of the drawings, it’s really very much like the classic language used in comics. So, you have large pictures where the action has to stall a bit. And you have the whole physicality of turning the page, where something new happens. And it’s completely in that idiom, but at the same time, you have this meta story of the people who are writing this comic, and they’re even asking, ‘Why should we make a comic about logicians?’ And then you have somebody who says something like ‘they’re superheroes.’ Logicians are superheroes because they’re driven by passion, they want to find the truth, they are in pursuit of great goals. The story starts with a lecture by Bertrand Russell . You have Russell standing there on the podium and he starts his lecture by saying, ‘Okay we’re now in this situation, should we fight against the Nazis? Yes, or no?’ It’s 1939, and there is this whole thing in the UK, should they or shouldn’t they? Should they be trying to keep the peace with the Nazis? And that didn’t go very well, it didn’t last very long. Russell was a pacifist and the audience knew that. And he says, ‘Well, before we do that we have to think about the rules of thoughts, to make such a decision.’ And then you go back in the past, and you see Russell and the people around him. “I really enjoy comics” It’s just marvellous, it really gives a sensitive portrait of the introspective person that Russell was, with all these different things—his atheism, his pacifism, the people he was around, his interest in mathematics and logic, how as a boy, he got into this this stuff about mathematical foundations. It’s really brilliantly done. Throughout the book, you have, on the one hand, this immediate urgency of World War II , but you also have, on the other, this more cold, dispassionate thinking about the quest for truth. It’s interesting because now we’re running from one drama to another, ‘Oh, the election drama here. The Covid drama there and yet another lockdown’ and so on. But, at the same time, we do have this enduring quest for truth. We want to learn true things and we don’t want to believe false things. And I think this book does a great job of showing why that is important, even as you have a lot of drama that unfolds. The other stuff, the rational, cool, dispassionate—but at the same time passionate, because you can be really passionate about finding the right rules in mathematics and in logic—that’s just as valuable, if not more valuable, than all this history drama."

"I saw the first inklings of this graphic novel when I went to a meeting in Mykonos on maths and narrative and it really looked an incredibly exciting project. I enjoy the graphic novel as an art form and I’ve always enjoyed Tintin and this has a very Tintinesque line to it, the illustration. But it brings alive one of the great stories of 20th-century mathematics, which is the crisis that happened when Gödel proved that there are statements about numbers which are true but which will never be proved. And this went against the whole ethos of mathematics since the ancient Greeks. If something is true, we should be able to prove why it’s true. If there are infinitely many primes, we can prove that there are infinitely many primes. But we don’t know that there are infinitely many twin primes: Primes that are two apart, like 17 and 19. Maybe that’s a true statement that doesn’t have a proof and we’re trying to chase something that doesn’t exist. Gödel’s theorem, proved in the 1930s, was a real bombshell for the philosophy of mathematics. It’s about Russell and Wittgenstein and also Hilbert, Frege, Gödel, Cantor. Ideas of infinity are in there. But it’s just a beautifully told story and also they talk about their writing of the book, so it’s very self-referential, which is the whole key to Gödel’s proof. And there’s a lovely use of the graphic novel form, of people’s thought bubbles inside thought bubbles inside thought bubbles. It’s incredibly playful and I think it’s a fantastic addition to the mathematical literature."