It was in this exhilarating period of great hope in the certainty of the laws of mathematics that Russell started writing his The Principles of Mathematics. “In mathematics,” he declared, "there is no ignorabimus". He stated that mathematics should be purely and strictly logical, bereft of contradictions, and for this the foundations of mathematics should be made totally certain. The great mathematician David Hilbert made an impassioned speech in 1900 in which he entreated fellow mathematicians to reject intuition and look for rigorous proof as the yardstick for mathematical truth. " Ignoramus et ignorabimus," the pessimists seemed to say (a Latin maxim that means "we do not know and will not know"). Logicomix traces the life of British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, and its underlying theme is the struggle of Russell and other logicians in their search for truth and certainty in mathematics.Īt the end of the nineteenth century, with the advent of non-Euclidean geometry and other ideas, a strand of pessimism had crept into mathematics. He has written the novel Turing: A Novel about Computation (2003) and is a great advocate of teaching children mathematics through fiction.
The other co-author of Logicomix, Papadimitriou, is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Petros' life could be compared with that of great artists like Vincent van Gogh and Mozart – a poignant reminder of the agony and suffering that accompanies great creativity. (Indian readers will find it interesting that Srinivasa Ramanujan, the native-born genius, makes an appearance in this book.) Petros fails grandly in his endeavour – the conjecture remains unproven.
Uncle Petros, as narrated from the perspective of his nephew, makes for an intoxicating read. It is one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics along with the Riemann hypothesis. The conjecture is deceptively simple: it states that “every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes”. The book features a mathematician Petros Papachristos who devotes his entire mathematical career to proving what is known as Goldbach's conjecture.
A mathematics graduate from Columbia University, Doxiadis pioneered the genre of mathematical fiction with his book Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (first published in Greek in 1992 and then in English in 2000). The graphic novel Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (2009) by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou is a unique attempt in literature – mathematical ideas transmitted through the medium of a comic book.Ī few words about Doxiadis.
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