Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, logician, mathematician, my school-time philosopher hero, and Nobel prize for literature winner who wrote the seminal work on mathematical logic, the Principia Mathematica, is now a graphic novel hero. The hit 'comic', Logicomix has become a bestseller in Greece and has been picked up by several publishers across the world -- from China to Turkey, Israel to Italy. The UK version by Bloomsbury is expected in September this year. Bertrand Russell died in 1970 at the age of 97. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth portrays the story of his life and the great 60s pacifist's quest to pin down the foundations of mathematics. Sounds so tera menera yah? But it was a tera menera period, the 60s, with the Vietnam war, with the Beatles and Bob Dylan, with Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro, with nuclear proliferation, with the hippies, with Charles Manson ... and with Bertrand Russell. It was he who got me interested in the scope and universality of mathematics, and the language of philosophers.
Logicomix is written by maths expert and novelist Apostolos Doxiadis, who was admitted to Columbia University at the age of 15, and Christos Papadimitriou, a computer scientist and novelist. The artwork is by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna.
"Covering a span of 60 years, it tells the story of Russell's life, taking in his childhood, brought up by his grandparents after he was orphaned aged four, his four marriages, the writing of his great work Principia Mathematica, his rivalry with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his quest for nuclear disarmament in the last decades of his life."
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