Logicomix

I picked up a copy of Logicomix (A. Doxiadis) last fall in Vancouver. The prospect of seeing Bertrand Russell turned into a comic character was enough of a motivation, not to mention the likes of Wittgenstein, Gödel, and Alan Turing.

Always since I heard about Russell's paradox I've had some sort of mathematician envy. Understanding this very simple contradiction changed the way I looked at maths, and got me quite obsessed for a little while. Well, the story of the barber who only shaves people who don't shave themselves is right there in the comic, and it goes on to tell the tale of how the foundations of mathematics were shaken by a group of freakish mathematicians. It is exactly the characters, more than the "science" itself what the focus of the book is... rightly so I believe, although I can imagine that those who are actually trained in maths might finish the book with some sort of bittersweet taste to it, wanting to see more science.

The book is coauthored by a computer scientist, and it is quite a thrill to see how the very core of maths is historically and scientifically connected to the machines that are nowadays (virtually) in everyone's life.

PD: If you like this one, read Uncle Petro and Goldbach's conjecture, from the same author, it s at the very least just as good, although that's a rather void comparison, since the latter is a novel, and not a comic book, and I don't particularly like comics.