A book about a gang of logicians, philosophers and other super-geeks struggling to establish the foundational truth of mathematics doesn't sound like one of those things you just can't put down.

But then, "Logicomix" isn't just a book.

It's a graphic novel, basically a long-form comic book, that actually makes this "Epic Search for Truth" (the subtitle) come alive like a mystery thriller with all sorts of battling egos, infidelity, madness, horror and the twisting turns that make any narrative a page-turner.

"This was one of those tragic, Sisyphean quests," said Christos Papadimitriou, one of the authors of Logicomix and a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. Papadimitriou will speak Friday, 7:30 p.m., at Town Hall Seattle ($5 admission).

It was an epic tragedy, like that mythic Greek Sisyphus fellow who was doomed to push that damn rock up the hill only to watch it roll back down again, because they failed to prove the absolute truth of mathematics. At the root of mathematics, logic and science there remains still a bit of festering uncertainty, Papadimitriou said.

In Logicomix, the main character is Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher and logician who spent much of his career trying to do away with the unresolved questions and assumptions of mathematics.

To get some idea of Russell's plight, it's worth noting that his magnum opus, Principia Mathematica (written with fellow logician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead), is a three-volume set of equations and arguments that attempts to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that 1+1=2. Much of Logicomix describes the torment of making this case, which Russell decides they failed to make.

"This story has always fascinated me," Papadimitriou said. It was a failure to rid mathematics and logic of uncertainty, he said, but the struggle was nevertheless a boon for humanity and progress.

"This all led to computation," Papadimitriou said. "What we are talking about here is the prehistory of computers."

Besides Russell, there are many other characters in this colorful and vivid tale of a debate that occupied much of the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th Centuries -- George Boole, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Gödel, David Hilbert, John Von Neumann and Alan Turing.

Sure, they talk about algorithms, axioms and set theory. But they also get into drunken fistfights, cheat with their friends' wives, kill in wartime and frequently simply go nuts.

Madness is as much a theme of Logicomix as is mathematics. One of the messages of this tale appears to be that the search for absolute certainty makes you just as prone to mental instability as religious extremism -- which is also part of this story. Russell saw logic as a refuge and antidote to his puritanical Christian upbringing.

But, as the graphic novel describes in great rousing fashion, the devotees of logic and mathematics discovered they were perhaps being just as fundamentalist in trying to rid their world of uncertainty and mystery.

Papadimitriou, as well as his co-authors, also play roles in the graphic novel. He is initially dubious of trying to render this massive intellectual struggle into a comic narrative, and says so all the way through Logicomix. His co-author, Apostolos Doxiadis, a mathematician, writer and filmmaker, argues -- also as a character -- that the graphic novel is the perfect way to tell this tale. Like all quests, Doxiadis contends, it is ultimately about people.

"The heroes of the quest are fascinating people, passionate, tortured. In fact, true superheroes," his cartoon iteration states on a hillside overlooking Athens. Given that both authors are Greek, and the Greeks (Euclid, Aristotle) began this quest, it's not surprising that Logicomix frequently makes note of the ancient Mediterranean roots of this struggle.

In addition to Papadimitriou and Doxiadis were the artists, of course, who made this tale a visual feast -- Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna. Once you read Logicomix, it's hard to imagine how else you could have possibly gained such a clear and fairly comprehensive view of the failed, epic search for the foundation of mathematics.

It is a tragedy, in a sense, but as is so often the case in science, failure simply paves the way for a different direction of progress.

"This failure is a part of our science now," Papadimitriou said. Nobody expects to achieve absolute anything, he added, but progress is made when we resolve one set of questions and thereby spawn a new, more interesting set of questions.

Read this on the Seattle PI website.