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“The story starts with a lecture by Bertrand Russell. You have Russell standing there on the podium and he starts his lecture by saying, ‘Okay we’re now in this situation, should we fight against the Nazis? Yes, or no?’ It’s 1939, and there is this whole thing in the UK, should they or shouldn’t they? Should they be trying to keep the peace with the Nazis? And that didn’t go very well, it didn’t last very long. Russell was a pacifist and the audience knew that. And he says, ‘Well, before we do that we have to think about the rules of thoughts, to make such a decision.’ And then you go back in the past, and you see Russell and the people around him.” Read more...
“I enjoy the graphic novel as an art form and I’ve always enjoyed Tintin and this has a very Tintinesque line to it, the illustration. But it brings alive one of the great stories of 20th-century mathematics, which is the crisis that happened when Gödel proved that there are statements about numbers which are true but which will never be proved. And this went against the whole ethos of mathematics since the ancient Greeks…It’s about Russell and Wittgenstein and also Hilbert, Frege, Gödel, Cantor. Ideas of infinity are in there. But it’s just a beautifully told story and also they talk about their writing of the book, so it’s very self-referential, which is the whole key to Gödel’s proof. And there’s a lovely use of the graphic novel form, of people’s thought bubbles inside thought bubbles inside thought bubbles. It’s incredibly playful and I think it’s a fantastic addition to the mathematical literature.” Read more...
The best books on The Beauty of Maths
Marcus du Sautoy, Mathematician
