A Visual Phenomenon
Written by Damian Mac Con Uladh, ATHENS NEWS   
Wednesday, 17 February 2010 21:19
LOGIC AND mathematics. Subjects that enthral co-authors Christos Papadimitriou and Apostolos Doxiadis, but hardly the stuff for a graphic novel, much less a bestseller.

But since its publication in Greek in 2008, and then a dozen languages, including English, a year later, Logicomix has topped sales charts in Holland, the UK and the US, in some cases selling out on the first day of release.

While its success has been impressive, its beginnings were humble. Shortly before the book was first published, Papadimitriou rediscovered that he had doodled his own long-forgotten stories as a teenager  in Athens.

“Two summers ago, while renovating my parental home, I found box after box of my copybooks that my mother had meticulously kept from elementary school up to university,” Papadimitriou now recalls. “Browsing through them, I found a couple of notebooks which cannot be described as anything else other than graphic novels - OK, they were silly teenage fantasies using stick figures, but there was a plot.”

Not so graphic

Before embarking on the eight-year-long odyssey which became Logicomix, Papadimitriou had only read one graphic novel - Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Dealing with the difficult, even inexpressible impact of the Holocaust on survivors, Maus made a huge impression on Papadimitriou.

“I cannot consider the same effect through any other means,” he says. “Maus is, of course, a masterpiece, and something that everyone related to graphic novels looks up to.”

The power of logic to defeat irrationality is one of the many themes featured in Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, which Papadimitriou co-authored with his friend Doxiadis.

Together, the authors connect Kurt Goedel’s “incompleteness theorem” of 1931 - which holds that no matter what axioms are adopted, there will always be true statements in arithmetic that cannot be proven - to the struggle against irrationality, in this case Nazism.

As Papadimitriou explains, the finding led mathematicians to define what a computer is for the first time, and one of those early computing pioneers was Alan Turing, who during the Second World War worked at cracking the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park.

“Historians would say that this is a stretch,” Papadimitriou says. “But the truth is that the British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park were apparently extremely decisive and important in deciding the fortunes of the Battle of the Atlantic.”

Logicomix II?

It’s something that may lead to a sequel, Papadimitriou says, although the time it took to produce Logicomix makes him wary.

Papadimitriou, now a professor in computer science at Berkeley, studied at the Varvakeio, a public experimental high school in Athens. In 1967, soon after the military coup, he progressed to the Athens Polytechnic, where he studied mathematical and electrical engineering.

The junta left him utterly disillusioned and by 1973 he was convinced that the rule of coup leader Papadopoulos would last.

“I really thought that Papadopoulos was here to stay. After all, at that stage, Franco was in power for 40 years.”

Of course, he’s delighted that he was wrong. “Two months after I arrived in the US, the Polytechneio student revolt broke out and that was the beginning of the end. But the previous year I was in the army and I had a completely different perspective.”

Junta next

His next book project, which he expects to finish by next year, is about the junta, “that black period”, as he calls it.

The experience of living under that regime and its “incompetent and marginally sane” leaders gave him a lasting interest in peace and freedom, something to which his Logicomix character (he appears as himself in the graphic novel) refers to throughout.

What Papadimitriou the character says in this regard is what he believes, too. “When I’m in a bad mood and I look around, I see very few reasons for hope. But the internet is one of the things that always gives me hope.”

In person, he explains: “In a very deep way, [the internet] does not belong to anybody and cannot be controlled. There is a phrase out there, quoted many times, that the internet wants to be free. This means free of government intervention, free of corporate control and free of charge.

“Nothing is absolute, but there is so much truth in this. Of course, there are efforts to control it, tax it, suppress it, whatever - both by the undemocratic governments in Saudi Arabia and China, and, frankly, by the West, the USA, the EU. They are also protagonists in this.”

Of epic proportions

LOGICOMIX: An Epic Search for Truth follows the tortuous and Sisyphean quest of British philosopher, logician and pacifist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) for the foundations of mathematics and his search for logic as a shield from the insanity that consumed other members of his family, but also academic colleagues.

A deeply personal account, which looks at intimate aspects of Russell’s biography, the narrative also encompasses his interactions with the legendary thinkers and mathematicians of his era, including Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert and Kurt Goedel, and his passionate student Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Numerous historical references, such as the rise of Nazism and classical tragedies, serve as a backdrop to the novel’s more abstract and philosophical subject-matter.

The Greek connection

WHILE the central theme of Logicomix is the tale of two friends trying to understand the epic journey of mathematical logic undertaken by, in the main, British, German and Austrian scholars, the nationalities of the co-authors - friends Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou - has left an unmistakable Greek imprint throughout.

The novel was conceived eight and a half years ago in Athens when the two authors met for the first time, over lunch. Finding that they were both intrigued by the story, Doxiadis later suggested producing a book on it some months later.

“Apostolos had this idea that this could be best done as a graphic novel, which took me by complete surprise,” recalls Papadimitriou, adding: “When I first heard it, I laughed, and when I realised he was serious, I cried.”

Golden opportunity

While their common Greek background brought the two together, Papadimitriou says that both “immediately saw an opportunity in that”.

“This is a story about one of the epics of the human intellect. We saw it as an irresistible idea to explain the story with the backdrop of Athens, where other epics unfolded,” he says.

While Papadimitriou says the book could have been written “just as well by non-Greeks”, he and Doxiadis seem to agree that the novel’s Greek character adds an important element.

“I think the fact that the whole adventure of logic, making a science out of it, and trying to tame chaos and madness through reasons is, in a sense, a very Greek story,” Doxiadis says.

“What is most Greek about the book is our dialogic sense of approaching the material,” he adds. “Usually when you have a narrator, you have one narrator, but here we have a team of people who are constantly disagreeing about everything.”

For Doxiadis, this is what is quintessentially Greek. “That’s the cliche and parody of modern Greece,” he says. “But the flipside is the birth of critical thinking and philosophy, which is about not taking things for granted.”

Not only did this Athenian backdrop allow for the depiction of the two minds thrashing out the story while strolling around the Plaka and Thiseio, but it also allowed for the inclusion of the central theme of an ancient Greek play - Aeschylus’ Oresteia.

A tragedy with a happy ending - much like the quest in Logicomix - it traces the fate of King Agamemnon’s son Orestes, who finds himself facing the wrath of the Furies, the goddesses of revenge, over his killing of his husband-murdering mother. In it, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, succeeds in enshrining the right to trial by jury, a system based on reason, as opposed to the older way, where the power to condemn rested with an absolute ruler.

Making reading a habit

ALTHOUGH he says it’s gratifying to hear from readers that Logicomix helped them understand mathematics, Christos Papadimitriou says that was never the goal.

“We wanted to tell a story, one that people would never forget, one that they would dream about,” says Papadimitriou, who co-authored the graphic novel with Apostolos Doxiadis.

No doubt Logicomix has people reading, and reading a subject-matter that they may have otherwise avoided, and this in turn reflects the goals of another initiative in which Papadimitriou and Doxiadis are involved.

Established in 2005 by the authors as well as others, the Thales and Friends initiative is a non-profit organisation which has taken to Greek classrooms to encourage reading and discussion.

“When we started, there weren’t really any reading groups in Greece, and none in schools,” Doxiadis says.

‘Cover to cover’

“The reality is that many children grow up in homes where reading doesn’t take place and that most schools don’t have libraries. In fact, there is nothing in the curriculum that actually encourages children to read books from cover to cover.”

We want to give students and teachers an intelligent alternative outside the school syllabus, Doxiadis says, adding that for many children, participating in a reading group represented a first.

“I’ve met many students in reading groups who tell me that they’ve actually never read a book in their life and that they probably wouldn’t have read one were it not for the group,” Doxiadis says.

When the group started the reading circles five years ago in 20 schools in Piraeus, the focus was on mathematics. Since then, the reading groups have expanded their scope to any book that deals with “matters of the mind as well as the emotions”.

Much needed

Doxiadis sees the Thales and Friends model as a necessary supplement to the state school system.
“Greeks expect too much from the state. We’ve even been criticised for doing something that the state should be doing,” he explains. “There’s a common reflex of complaining that the state isn’t doing enough, so that’s what motivated us to set this up, to actually do something for education in Greece.”

To date, given its limited resources, the group doesn’t approach schools, but responds to those that contact it. In recent months, the group has organised reading circles in northern Greece, even in smaller towns and villages. Its next step will be a revamping of its outdated website and using the internet - podcasts in particular - to promote its goals.