As mentioned on the Quine episode, I'm proposing a Not School reading group on Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Christos H. Papadimitriou, Apostolos Doxiadis, and some fine illustrators, which is about Russell and Wittgenstein, with some cameos by Frege, Gödel, and other names dropped during our analytic episodes. It's a graphic novel, running 300+ pages, and seems comfortably readable within the month of December. Here's a review from the NY Times that talks about how much of the book is accurate vs. dramatic license. To join, sign up to be a PEL Citizen.
(See also Daniel's post on this, and a description on the Math Mutation podcast site.)
-Mark Linsenmayer
Excerpt from the NY Times.
I just finished Logicomix. What a great book recommendation. Easy to read all the way through, but it gives you pause to think.
For some reason the finale, wherein the goddess Athena pardons Orestes, enjoining the furies to join with her in a marriage of emotion and reason, under wisdom, touched me to the point of laughter and tears – and I’m not the artsy-fartsy type. Go figure, Maybe I’m a reincarnated Greek tragedian ;’)
For those of you who enjoyed Logicomix, I would like to recommend Bruce Duffy’s wonderful, and I think under appreciated, 1987 novel The World As I Found It. The novel’s primary focus is on Wittgenstein, but Moore and Russell also figure prominently. In this novel the rigorously analytic is portrayed as a complex human endeavor, with the abstractions of thought grounded in the events and emotions of real lives, richly re-imagined. A brilliant theme with reflective hi-lights of luminous prose.