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Turning Geeks into Superheroes
Apostolos Doxiadis ’72 merges math and comic books
Faster than a graphing calculator. Tougher
than a complex proof. Able to turn a
nerdy subject into a compelling story in
fewer than 350 pages. It’s Mathman!
Actually, it’s Apostolos Doxiadis ’72, who may
be the first alumnus to fall into the same category
as Batman and Superman. Doxiadis is the co-author
and on-page guide of the best-selling graphic novel
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (Bloomsbury,
$22.95), the story of Bertrand Russell and the
search to establish a logical foundation for all of
mathematics.
While the graphic novel may not seem the
ideal genre to attack the greatest paradoxes
of the 20th century, Russell as narrator adds
enough POWs, ZAPs and KA-BLAMs to deserve
a space alongside the best of superheroes.
“Russell had advantages that made him a
dream narrator. He was known for his fluency
and his dry, ironic sense of humor as well
as his unconventional ideas and behavior,”
Doxiadis says. “He was more of a Huck Finn,
i.e., star and teller of his own adventure, than
an Ishmael in Moby Dick. Russell is undeniably
one of the great heroes of the quest.”
After a brief introduction by Doxiadis, his co-author, UC Berk e-
ley theoretical computer scientist Christos H. Papadimitriou, and
artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, the reader meets
Russell pushing his way through a crowd of anti-war protestors at
the beginning of WWII.
The protestors appeal to his pacifism and ask him to join them
instead of going into an American university to give a speech.
Instead, Russell invites them in and proceeds on a tale that begins
with his childhood and takes readers through an enthralling
narrative of his tumultuous relationships, his fear of madness and
his consuming journey into “The Crisis of Foundation,” the search
for unifying truths.
“Russell had a tragic childhood, and his falling in love with the
‘cold beauty’ (his words) of mathematics was partly an escape
from horrible internal insecurities and dilemmas,” Doxiadis says.
“This personal stance seemed to us to be a perfect metaphor
for the role that the quest for Foundations played in the troubled
times in which it took place: an almost maniacal search for complete
certainty in an increasingly uncertain and dangerous world.”
The reader also is introduced to mathematicians A.N. Whitehead,
Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel, as well as their contributions
to the quest.
Even without the gene-mutating exposure to a nuclear reactor,
Russell is able to tackle the problems of his times in a compelling
story that Doxiadis made seem effortless.
He has had practice, though. Doxiadis has made his living in
the arts for three decades as a film and theater director, playwright
and novelist. Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s
Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession
(1992) was an unexpected bestseller and was
translated into more than 30 languages. The book
merges math and narrative, focusing on a young
man and his uncle, who is obsessed with trying to
solve a famous mathematical problem.
“When I wrote Uncle Petros, which really
marked my entry into this overlap, I wasn’t thinking
I was doing anything out of the way,” he says.
“Like all writers, I like to write about things I know
and care about.”
Doxiadis came to Columbia at 15, a self-described
math nerd who “tended to view all required, nonmathematical
courses as a nuisance.” Moving into
John Jay just after the protests of Spring 1968 and
witnessing the toll of the Vietnam War and a junta
in his native Greece, he got swept up in the political
upheaval of the moment — he can even be spotted
in protest footage that was used in Forrest Gump.
Through Contemporary Civilization and Introduction to
World Literature, he also discovered Plato and Kant and the
joy of analyzing Crime and Punishment.
Doxiadis did graduate work in applied mathematics at
images:
Alecos
Papadatos
the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris before returning
to Greece to work in theater and film, winning the prize of the
International Center for Artistic Cinema at the 1988 Berlin International
Film Festival for his second film, Terirem.
Since the mid-1980s, he has largely devoted himself to fiction,
which he says has many similarities to math, especially
when he is “in problem-solving mode” during the planning and
editing phases.
The departure to the graphic novel came about by luck when
two artist friends were looking for an idea for a book, and Doxiadis
proposed his math story. He found the process frustrating, the
writing being much more technical and exacting that what he was
used to as a novelist. Still, he says he would like to try again.
For now, Doxiadis is completing three scholarly papers based
on a cognitive study he recently finished on “how logical and
mathematical thinking were born in the agonistic context of
classical Athenian democracy, through influences both from
judicial practice but also storytelling and poetry.”
After that, he plans to leave math alone for a while.
“With these projects, I feel I’m pretty much done with it for
a while and would like to go back to the usual subjects for a
writer,” he says. What might those be “Oh, you know, sex and
violence and passions and ideas and their interrelations — and
suchlike!”
Ethan Rouen ’04J
To view a video about the making of Logicomix, go to www.
college.columbia.edu/cct.
vost Emeritus. Brinkley’s profile
of Luce — the founder of Time, Life
and Fortune magazines — criticizes
many of the media mogul’s professional
choices while applauding
his contributions to American journalism
(Alfred A. Knopf, $35).
Storms of My Grandchildren: The
Truth about the Coming Climate
Catastrophe and Our Last Chance
to Save Humanity by James Hansen,
adjunct professor of earth and
environmental sciences. Hansen’s
discussion of climate changes incorporates
political and historical
as well as scientific perspectives
(Bloomsbury USA, $25).
The Bridge: The Life and Rise
of Barack Obama by David Remnick.
Remnick, the Pulitzer Prizewinning
editor of The New Yorker,
analyzes the social implications of
Barack Obama ’83’s presidential
campaign (Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95).
Grace Laidlaw ’11
july/august 2010
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