Logicomix

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth is a 2008 graphic novel by Greek writer Apostolos Doxiadis, assisted by Christos Papadimitriou, a theoretical computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley (and the author of a novel about Alan Turing). The novel is a biography of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, focusing on Russell’s attempt to find a secure logical foundation for mathematics. The novel’s artwork is by Alexos Papadatos, with color by Annie Di Donna. The four collaborators appear throughout the novel, discussing its themes and characters as they stroll around Athens, Greece with their dog Manga.

The novel’s story begins on the day the Second World War broke out. Bertrand Russell is in America, where he is due to deliver a lecture on “The Role of Logic in Human Affairs.” Pacifist demonstrators in the audience call on Russell—a famous pacifist—to declare that war is illogical. He responds by telling the life story of one of logic’s “most ardent fans”: that is, himself.

The story moves back to the 1870s. Russell is a small boy, growing up under the care of his harsh grandmother, after the unexplained (to him) disappearance of his parents. In his isolation, Russell takes comfort in books, and in particular, the glittering logical truths of philosophy and mathematics.



One day, young Russell is taken to his parents’ grave. Later that same day, Russell encounters an amputee veteran of the Crimean war. In a final blow, Russell learns that his Uncle Willy is a violent lunatic, shut away for his own protection. Russell nears a breakdown himself, having a series of hallucinatory nightmares. He is pulled back from the brink of madness by the security and certainty of mathematics: particularly Euclid’s Geometry. However, he is left with a lasting fear of going mad.

As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, Russell learns that mathematics as practiced by mathematicians is anything but rigorous and pure, relying instead on intuition and various shortcuts to proof. He resolves to find secure, logical foundations for mathematical truth.

Russell meets an American Quaker called Alice and they fall in love. Alice becomes Russell’s wife. Together, the couple tour Europe, where Russell meets the great philosopher-logician Gottlob Frege and the mathematician Georg Cantor (the inventor of set theory). Both men are troublingly strange. Cantor is confined in an asylum. Russell and Alice move on to Paris, where they witness the great debate between the mathematicians Henri Poincaré and David Hilbert over the importance of proof in mathematics.



The ideas of all these thinkers are explored and illustrated: for example, mathematical conceptions of infinity are introduced through “Hilbert’s Hotel,” which due to its infinite number of rooms, can accommodate more guests even when it is full.

Armed with the latest developments in logic and mathematics, Russell returns to England. With the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, he begins work on their collaborative Principia Mathematica. Meanwhile, Russell falls for Whitehead’s wife, Evelyn.

When Russell and Whitehead are nearing the end of their epic work, Russell discovers a flaw in their logic: a paradox that destabilizes their entire system (the paradox of the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves as members). The project of reducing mathematics to logic is doomed.



The book is published with a note disclaiming its conclusions. On the day of publication, Russell tells Evelyn that he loves her. His marriage collapses. Elsewhere, Cantor hears about Russell’s paradox, and breaks down in a fit of madness.

Russell’s brilliant young student, Ludwig Wittgenstein, begins to undermine the little certainty Russell thought he had achieved, arguing that even objective reality can never be proven to exist.

The First World War breaks out, and Russell witnesses a rally for peace become a patriotic riot. He reinvents himself as a “militant pacifist.”



Wittgenstein puts the final nail in the coffin of Russell’s project when he argues that logic can never ultimately be proved: logic, in Wittgenstein’s account, is the set of rules that govern thinking. Thought always presupposes logic. “There it was,” Russell tells his audience in the lecture hall, “for twenty years I had sweated to justify the existence of a machine for manufacturing tautologies.”

By now married to a new wife, Dora, Russell has a son, and abandons the search for logical truth in favor of trying to create an ideal educational program. His experimental school fails.

The mathematician Kurt Gödel formulates a proof that not everything true can logically be proven. Russell accepts that his dream of philosophical certainty is well and truly done for: “There will always be unanswerable questions.”



The story returns to its opening: Russell in the lecture hall. He tells his audience that logic is no foundation for human affairs. Instead we must rely on “Responsibility, Justice, even a sense of Good vs Evil.”

The novel ends with its creators watching the Oresteia by Aeschylus. The play ends with the goddess Athena bringing a cycle of revenge to a close through rational justice. But she invites the goddesses of vengeance and fury—madness—to remain in the city. “To achieve wisdom, you must… allow for a lot that’s usually left out as un-wise,” one of the book’s authors (Doxiadis) concludes.