(Bloomsbury, 347 pages, $22.95)
The quest for a logical foundation to mathematics might seem too arid a subject for a 350-page book, let alone a 350-page comic book, said John Walsh in the London Independent. But don’t let that “put you off.” The creators of Logicomix, an “extraordinary” and extraordinarily unlikely international best-seller, have placed a compelling protagonist at the center of this richly rewarding philosophical drama. Bertrand Russell, the British “logician, philosopher, mathematician, reformer, pacifist, activist, jailbird and chronic womanizer,” was nearly driven around the bend by his decades-long hunt for the unshakable principles upon which all math and science were built.
What tripped up Russell’s search was a seemingly innocuous logic puzzle he discovered in 1901, said Alex Bellos in the London Guardian. “Russell’s paradox” turns on the puzzling nature of self-referential statements. Imagine a town where a barber is required to shave all men who do not shave themselves. “Who shaves the barber? If he doesn’t shave himself he shaves himself, and if he shaves himself he doesn’t shave himself.” While most of us would consider this “an amusing quirk of language,” it badly derailed Russell. “Contradiction is a fatal bullet wound for any logical system,” and Russell spent years trying to puzzle out the problem. The authors lightly mock Russell’s agony by portraying this quest “as if the fate of the world depended on it,” and he were a superhero who “must battle his inner demons to achieve the task.” But though they have fun at their protagonist’s expense, their book “never trivializes the philosophy or mathematics.”
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It also doesn’t quite get the math right, said Jim Holt in The New York Times. The “one serious misstep” the authors make is that they overestimate the significance of Russell’s paradox. It didn’t bother most mathematicians much, though it did spell doom for his own life’s work. The spooked thinker slaved for the next decade alongside Alfred North Whitehead on Principia Mathematica, an impenetrable tome that famously includes a 362-page proof that 1+1=2. The authors raise the profoundly troubling question of whether Russell’s search for abstract certainty was, in itself, a form of madness. In “a beguiling coda,” we even get a satisfying answer. It boils down to this: “Life is greater than logic.”
