Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Tell us about your last book – Apostolos Doxiadis’s and Christos H Papadimitriou’s Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth.
This is quite a recent publication and I saw the first inklings of this graphic novel when I went to a meeting in Mykonos on maths and narrative and it really looked an incredibly exciting project. 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. If something is true, we should be able to prove why it’s true. If there are infinitely many primes, we can prove that there are infinitely many primes. But we don’t know that there are infinitely many twin primes: primes that are two apart, like 17 and 19. Maybe that’s a true statement that doesn’t have a proof and we’re trying to chase something that doesn’t exist. Gödel’s theorem, proved in the 1930s, was a real bombshell for the philosophy of mathematics.
Isn’t the book about Russell and Wittgenstein?
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.
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Marcus du Sautoy is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. In 2001 he won the prestigious Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society, awarded every two years to reward the best mathematical research made by a mathematician under 40. In 2004 Esquire magazine chose him as one of the 100 most influential people under 40 in Britain. In 2009 he was awarded the Royal Society’s Faraday Prize, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science. He received an OBE for services to science in the 2010 New Year’s Honours List. He wrote and presented a four-part landmark series for the BBC called The Story of Maths. He has a regular column in The Times called Sexy Science.
