A Graphic Novel Review: LOGICOMIX

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade - Rabindranath Tagore

I never read Graphic Novels, although I did thoroughly enjoy the first couple volumes of Conan. But the more I read in this medium, the more I understand just how effective they are in entertaining, informing, and keeping my attention. By accident, I walked past the Graphic Novel section at Barnes & Noble and my eye briefly scanned a black book with a silver title and a somewhat interesting image. It was called "LOGICOMIX: an epic search for truth”, co-written by Apostolos Doxiadis (a mathematician from Columbia University) and Christos H. Papadimitriou (professor of computer science at Berkley), illustrated by Papadatos and DiDonna (if that matters, since I don’t know many Graphic Artists).

LOGICOMIX gives us a very loose biography of the great logician, mathematician, social activist, and philosopher Sir Bertrand Russell, and his interactions with Gottlob Frege (logician and philosopher), George Cantor (creator of set theory), Ludwig Wittgenstein (genius philosopher), Alfred North Whitehead (mathematician and philosopher), Kurt Godel (mathematician and philosopher), David Hilbert (genius German mathematician: tried to base all math on axioms), and Henri Poincare (genius French mathematician: tried to base math on intuition).

We watch the cloistered Russell as a child growing up under the dictatorship of his grandmother (his grandfather John Russell was Prime Minister of England before his death). Before his grandfather’s death, Russell snuck away from the suffocating eye of his grandmother and found a paradise of books in John Russell’s library, some of which were good to read, and others forbidden. Haunted by strange sounds in the night, Russell’s imagination was plagued by thoughts of ghosts and monsters. But as he grew in stature and wisdom, he broke away from the shackles of superstition and his slave-master, the grandmother. Throughout his life, Russell would be afflicted with a paranoia about mental illness and insanity, which the study of logic doesn’t help to cure.

Russell became obsessed with finding out how he could get certain knowledge about the world. For a crucial part of his life, he thought he found an answer in the study of mathematics and logic. As a philosophy major, I found this part the most interesting. The later years of the 19th century up until the second world war were filled with mathematical and philosophical geniuses that were all arguing about one central thing. What exactly is mathematics? Are numbers real? What is the best theory to explain mathematics? What justifies our axioms of mathematics? How do we prove our axioms? All of this gets very complex very quickly, so perhaps I can pinpoint one issue and how it progressed.

Enter George Cantor, inventor of set theory, a proposed way to ground mathematics, a proposed theory to explain mathematics. The year is 1873, and Bertrand Russell would have been a year old. Very briefly, the theory said that understanding mathematics means understanding sets, and sets (very briefly) are collections, collections of anything and everything, from objects to people to insects to books to numbers themselves. In 1893, Frege used set theory to invent first-order predicate logic, which supplements Aristotle’s logic. For example, instead of saying “Socrates was a Man”, Frege would say: “There exists an X such that X is a man and X is Socrates.” There’s a reason for that but I won’t get into it for spacial reasons.

But then Russell comes along and ruins everything with his paradox. Russell asks: “If there are sets, can’t there be sets of sets?” Example: I can have the set of insects and the set of animals, but can’t I also have the set of all the sets of animals and insects? Seems innocent enough. What if we go further? Consider: the set of humans isn’t a human: it’s a set. Simple. But this is a kind of set. What kind of set? The kind of set that doesn’t include itself. So, Russell asks: can’t there be a set of ‘these kinds of sets’: namely, the sets of all those sets that don’t include themselves? There’s the paradox! If there is such a set, then it’s not a member of itself; but if it’s not a member of itself, it IS a member of itself. Everything fell like a house of cards. This is just one out of a sea of stories LOGICOMIX documents in a clear, entertaining, and informative way.

You’ll see the story of Russell’s landmark book Principia Mathematica, the attempt to base mathematics on logic, to make mathematics an extension of logic. There is the child prodigy Kurt Godel who was one of the few to read all three volumes of The Principia from cover to cover, understand everything, discover the few axioms that Russell takes for granted, and come up with his Incompleteness Theorem, which does to The Principia what Russell’s paradox did to Frege’s set theory. All of this and a lot more.

There’s three main story lines.The overarching story represents the authors trying to get an expert consult up to speed because of a case of writer’s block. The authors and the consult banter back and forth about why they should even write this in the first place, whether anyone will want to read it, or whether they got a view of Russell’s correct, or whether this whole thing is a waste of time. The first half of the novel is retrospect, tracking their steps up to the present, seeing if they can turn something as abstruse as logic and mathematics into something somewhat engaging.

In the second story line, we switch back and forth between the real time of the authors and the imagined time of a speech Russell is giving to an audience of world war II-era pacifists on the importance of logic in social and political affairs. Finally, in the third story line, the speech sets up the imaginary reminiscence of his childhood, an autobiography Russell tells the audience, where we see him grow up from a child to the adult he now is. Though some of the character’s personalities were exaggerated with poetic license, I saw how the Graphic Novel is an excellent medium, though the bubbly text is hard on the eyes at times. What the authors lack in substance throughout the book, they make up for in an appendix, providing brief bios of all the main players and brief blurbs on the major philosophies involved.