Logicomix

May 11, 2010
Christos Papadimitriou | C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley

LOGICOMIX is about the quest for the foundations of mathematics in the beginning of the 20th century, the subtle ways in which its ultimate failure brought about the computer. Disguised as a biography of mathematician Bertrand Russell in graphic novel form, this comic book is really about the nature and limits of logic. It takes heady, heavy, and key ideas in logic and renders them witty, visual, and dramatic. The fact that many of the original logicians were mentally unbalanced and irrational, adds a dash of delicious paradox and spice

Speaker Details

Christos Papadimitriou studied at Athens Polytechnic and Princeton, and taught computer science at Harvard, M.I.T., and Stanford, before joining the University of California at Berkeley as C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science. He has written over 200 papers on various aspects of theoretical computer science, and his four technical books have been translated in many languages. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the National Academy of Engineering. Besides his PhD from Princeton, he is holding a honorary doctorate from Zurich’s ETH and U. of Macedonia. He has won many prestigous awards the latest of them is the Knuth award. His first novel Turing (a Novel about Computation) will be published by M.I.T. Press the summer of 2003 (Greek translation: To Hamogelo tou Turing – Turing’s Smile – Livanis publishers).