Logicomix

7/10
Grand in scope but let down in part by the medium and some baffling decisions by the creators, Logicomix is still a fascinating read.
I've always loved it when serious topics are explored visually, whether in animation or books - but Logicomix overextends and underextends itself in turn. At the altar of brevity and mass appeal, it sacrifices accuracy, but this wouldn't have mattered so much if the crucial details covered were at the least in-depth, which they were sadly not.
A case in point is that Apostolos mentions Godel, Wittgenstein, Hilbert, von Neumann, and other giants, but he annoyingly glosses over their contributions. The book also repeatedly jumps out and into Athens or the ‘real world' instead of the comic world to explain some of its decisions to the reader - but this breaking the fourth wall is only partially effective since its novelty wears off quickly. It is utilized to excellent effect only near the end.
Where the book shines the most is letting its audience know, through comics, about Godel's incompleteness theorem of the first and second-order, Russell's paradox, and Wittgenstein's metaphysical theories - a sentence I could not imagine writing a day ago. And that fact alone is worth most, in not all of, the acclaim.

the interludes featuring the authors really get in the way of what is otherwise a really fascinating tale.

রাসেল, ভিটজেনস্টাইন, হোয়াইটহেড, ক্যান্টর, ট্যুরিং... চেনা চেনা নাম। হঠাৎ তাদের নিয়ে, জীবন নিয়ে, যুদ্ধ, মানুষ আর ম্যাডনেস নিয়ে কমিক্স পেলে ভালো লাগবে না?

আলবৎ লাগবে!


হিস্টোরিকালি অ্যাকুরেট না। যতটুকু ইনঅ্যাকুরেট বইয়ের শেষে বলা আছে।

Loved the book. Unique idea, beautiful artwork. I learned a lot about the historical connections between people and ideas in mathematics of late 19th and early 20th century.

My main quibble is that the only place in which people of color appear in this book is in the depiction of prostitutes (in 3 frames on page 210). I get that most of this takes place in Europe 80+ years ago, involving real persons, so I am not proposing adding “token” people of color to the story. I also get that modern Athens is a diverse city, which, I am willing to believe, has sex workers of African descent. Despite factual correctness, this choice of supporting characters does nothing to advance the story, while countering the attempts to make students with non-European roots feel part of the scientific community. Imagine a young African girl trying to learn about the foundations of computer science and only seeing people like her as those working with their bodies and not their minds. This unnecessary perpetuation of stereotypes could have been easily avoided; I hope it will be in future editions.

A graphic novel on Bertrand Russell's life and on the battles about the logical foundation of mathematics during the first half of the 20th century. With a dash of the madness of the brilliant. We (and Russell) meet all the important players along the way: Whitehead, Frege, Hilbert, Cantor, Poincaré, Wittgenstein, Gödel... The story of this quest of mathematics and it's importance is cleverly told on multiple levels, as the narrative jumps between Russell's life and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the graphic novel.

Bertrand Russel was an interesting guy, if not super nice to his first wife and hand-waving it away by saying that he wasn't a great person at the time. I'm into graphic novel biographies and mathematicians and ethics. I also liked the musing on logic vs. insanity.

Fascinating perspective on an attempt to give foundations to math through logic and looking at the life of Bertie Russell as well as exposing the concerns of those individual who wrote the graphic novel. While you do get this kind of transparency in author forwards and such, it's interesting to have it play such a clear part of telling the whole story. Some liberties were taken with the history - putting a couple people in places they probably weren't - but the ending points (most, all?) of them out and I think it serves the narrative flow ably. #metafiction #bookclub4m #bookclubformasochists

Brilliant graphic novel about the evolution of logic, centred on Bertrand Russel's earlier years, and providing tantalising references to the influence this movement would eventually have on the internet and computing.

This book is extremely well done. Everything from the art to the binding to the glossary really gives the feeling that it's a labor of love, nothing is rushed, every detail is considered. The subject is Bertrand Russell and his idealistic (quixotic?) quest to find a way to use logic to irrefutably prove the foundations of mathematics, and by extension, all of reality. The book does a great job of linking him to his influencers, contemporaries and those who took and built on his work while keeping the story moving and entertaining.

I'm not a big fan of Russell, his personality was thorny, he made some colossal intellectual and personal mistakes and ultimately his work on logic, while an important stepping stone, seems to have been almost entirely superseded by Gödel. That said, I'm no expert on the subject and I was heavily biased when Solzhenitsyn, who is one of my heroes and usually very generous in terms of character judgement, criticized Russell pretty brutally in The Gulag Archipelago. Despite all that, this book gave me more respect for Russell's unwavering commitment to finding truth and rationality.

Read it. It'll take you 3 hours.

Overall an enjoyable telling of Bertrand Russell life and work. Took kinda forever for them to get to Gödel, and I'm not really a fan of the story within a story within a story. It feels like a cheeky incompleteness reference and is just unnecessary.

Life can be very strange. Why would I pick up a graphic novel about the life of philosopher Bertrand Russell at the library convention? And, even odder, why would I choose to read it while I waited for a session to begin?

I like odd books. And I did like this one. But, warning: It is not for everyone. (Honestly, are there others who would enjoy reading this book? Not sure.)