Logicomix Summary

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=1949912&date=2015-03-29&pageid=1

Logicomix: 

A few weeks back, I waxed eloquent about Comics.  My interlude with comics continues, thanks to libraries and bookstores in Goa and of course, patrons of exclusive comic collections. ‘The improbable material for comic book treatment’ is what has me completely hooked and I can’t seem to let it go. One such graphic novel is Logicomix – An Epic Search for Truth (I am late arriving at it , it was  launched in Greece in Sept, 2009),  a helluva highbrow comic panel about mathematical philosophy based in the later part of  nineteenth century up to the Second World War.

Scientists, philosophers and mathematicians occupy inaccessible realms in the living world, completely incomprehensible to the minds of common masses. To transpose a journey of complex mathematics, logic and philosophy interwoven with a human angle to the stories of  star performers(mathematicians in this case), coloured with family history along with raging zeitgeist, is a feat very craftily achieved by the makers of this sensational comic strip. The graphic novel is the brainchild of two Greeks viz. Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou.  The former, an international expert on the relationship of mathematics to narrative and of the fame of the bestseller Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture (the maiden  foray which  bridged mathematics to the world of storytelling) ; and the latter, Bill Gates’ teacher, a professor of computer science at Berkeley and  the author of a novel on Alan Turing( the father of computer science, we recently watched him in Imitation Games).  The art was done by Alecos Papadatos (clean line drawings made famous by Herge’s Tintin series) and Annie Di Donna (color) who went location-hunting to original storyscapes on this pretext.  

It is a quest of Bertrand Russell (the British mathematician, philosopher, logician, reformer, pacifist and activist) for foundational logic in mathematics.  An orphaned, insecure, insomniac teenager with a history of raving family madness and mystery is driven by demons in his restless fearful mind (he is preyed by the idea bordering on certainty that he will go mad one day) to find a secure logical explanation to incongruities in his life  and the living world he sees around him. His epic obsessive search to find truth, through certainty and logic in mathematics (which should answer all conundrums of creation) spanning decades, in tandem with the work of historical figures like Leibniz, Boole and his contemporary sworn-logicians  Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor( the inventor of set theory)  and many other madmen of sciences, forms the idealistic core of the book(a mathematics scholar could most proficiently write a thesis paper outline with it). Whitehead the co-author of his great work Principia Mathematica and argumentative brilliant pupil Wittgenstein (who constantly challenged and spurred him on), too, form a major part of the narrative.

The frame of the comic panels switches between two threads – The story of Bertrand Russell and his geek buddies and the creators of the novel in the studio space arguing over cups of coffee, brainstorming and commenting on Russell’s mindscape, experiments, theories and personal life.  The second comic panel becomes the brilliant stroke on which the novel rides high. The creator panels and their discussions (an echo of the reader’s mind) ground the highly technical mathematical exposition into layman questions and plausible, lucid, digestible answers. Another frame to the storyline is Russell’s speech which begins the narrative and holds it in place to the end. He is invited to speak to a sceptical audience at an American University just before the US jump into WW II. The spectators want to know the logic of war and Russell answers them with the question, ‘What is Logic?’ -  taking the audience through an autobiographical  road trip of his dogged trail of finding logic through the father of logic – mathematical philosophy. His hard hitting attempts and decades of study to find logical provable equations to every unproven axiom and hypothetical assumptions (e.g. concept of infinity) on which mathematics is based, nearly drove him to insanity - the very blackness he was trying to escape.

The age old pursuit of man to rationally comprehend the world by reason (the basis of science, medicine, technology, wars in the modern world) lures the reader into the thick of the argument with Bertrand Russell to have Kurt Godel the mathematician announce "There will always be unanswerable questions," and that arithmetic is "of necessity incomplete" –toppling the very basis of logic.  In the end, Russell seeks saving grace for his soul by becoming a pacifist and a humanist seeking ethics and a peaceful world. A line echoed by Stephen Hawking too in The Theory of Everything – that as long as there is life there is hope, but to pinpoint the pulse of life is a futile endeavour.

The novel ends with the comic creators walking to a Greek amphitheatre where they watch Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus ( the first play of the series  Agamemnon, was staged in Kala Academy last month),  succinctly culminating the treatise with the climax that life is greater than logic.

Logicomix then becomes a masterpiece in equating logic to a comical quixotic quest to unravel the flawed fabric of reality. The ambiguity of truth and the conundrum of ‘madness and logic’ surface as prominent fallouts.

That such polemics is the heartthrob of Logicomix is a loud statement in itself!  Kudos!