Finally, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. This is a comic-book account of the great “crisis of foundations” that roiled math from the 1890s to the 1930s. All our favorites are here: Cantor and Frege, Hilbert and Turing, Russell and Wittgenstein, all imaginatively drawn in hundreds of colored frames. The text is by Apostolos Doxiadis, whose 1992 novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture I mentioned in my own Prime Obsession. Apostolos himself gets drawn, too: The narrative has a self-referential “frame” which, while not to my taste, is certainly appropriate to the topic. (Jim Holt gave Logicomix a notice in the New York Times here.)

Read the full September Diary on the NR website here.