The Last Book I Read

Last summer I was somewhat surprised at just how much I enjoyed reading The Music of Pythagoras by Kitty Ferguson, a book largely about mathematics. Son of a gun if I haven't just had a repeat experience with Logicomix by Apostalos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papidimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna-- a graphic novel about mathematics. Actually, that description is way incomplete. As the subtitle suggests ("An Epic Search For Truth"), there's a lot more going on here than a dry recitation of theorems and proofs. It's structured in the form of dual plots, each of which addresses how one goes about investigating the nature of truth, and while one of those plots (the more prominent, to be sure) follows the intellectual journey of mathematician, logician, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, the other traces the creative process employed by the authors of the book itself (actually kind of a neat play on one of the points of logic that Russell grapples with: self-reflexivity). In tracing academic debates of the early twentieth century in which Russell was deeply involved, the story threatens to be little more than a graphic summary of the challenges and breakthroughs that defined the field of mathematics during the modern era-- the era that largely made possible the amazing technological advances (both good and bad) that have so dramatically shaped contemporary life. But the concurrent story-- about how to tell Russell's story-- ultimately brings those academic debates down from the ivory tower, and places them into a human scale social setting (in both broad and narrow terms) that provides necessary context for determining the true value of what the great thinkers have accomplished. This book stands as powerful evidence of the confluence of ideas-- scientific, artistic, even mystical-- that contribute to our individual and collective grasp of the truth, no matter how tenuous that grasp may be.