Conville & Walsh

LOGICOMIX is the brainchild of two extraordinary men: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou. It tells the story behind foundational mathematics, the ultimately futile quest for a guarantee of the consistency and completeness of all mathematical truth – and thus, by extension, all natural science – and the birth of the modern computer.

The book opens in contemporary Athens (the city where logic was ‘born’ 25 centuries ago) but is largely set against the backdrop of some of the most momentous historical events of the twentieth century including the two World Wars. LOGICOMIX is told largely through the characters of Bertrand Russell and his peers in the field of maths, science and philosophy. We meet Georg Cantor, the father of set theory, Gottlob Frege, the great logician, David Hilbert and Henri Poincaré, both brilliant mathematicians and lifelong antagonists, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Gödel, a man known as the new Aristotle, and the two fathers of computing, Alan Turing and John von Neumann. But while LOGICOMIX is in part an intellectual quest it also, necessarily, vividly relates a complex interweaving story of the lives of these great men, their families and friends, and the partial achievements, tragedies and disappointments that marked this generation. It is a story that ends in an unexpected triumph and with great resonance for all of us because it culminates in the birth of the computer.