Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
This one needs to be quick, 14 minutes until midnight.
Logicomix (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In this post I want to introduce a graphic novel which I read about a year back - Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth.
How I ended up reading this is an interesting story in itself. Let me try to recite in minimum possible words. During that time (Sem 6) I had enrolled for a course called Computational Complexity by Murali sir. Now, as the name suggests, the course was pretty complex in itself. I had struggled to find good resources to read to ease myself into taking interest in the course. Classic CS hard cover books like Computational Complexity by Christos Papadimitriou weren’t of much help to this cause. Reading about the author, I discovered the UCB Professor had contributed to a graphic novel. I was curious and used some common pirate tricks to get the book’s PDF.
I have been a comics fan since early childhood. This graphic novel turned out to be a good find. Scrolled through few pages of the PDF lying comfortably in my bed, and I was hooked; finished the book in a couple of nights. The book basically tells the story of Bertrand Russell and his search for the foundations of mathematics, narrated by himself. One of my early mentors, Devendra sir, had once suggested to read the works of Russell (which I still hope to be able to do sometime), this book told me why he suggested that. Also, the book takes us through the interesting history of mathematics of the late 18th century and early 19th century.
I wrote a small review at Goodreads. FWIW the book got me interested into mathematics once again, which I had started despising since Sem 4, and led me to believe how learning the history behind development of a discipline can make it so interesting. I would recommend this book to anyone who ponders over the question - why learn theory when practice is what helps the most in our professional lives?
And it’s already 20 minutes past midnight when I finished writing this post. Need to start early next time to meet my daily goal. :)