At the heart of the book lies the life and work of the great Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, father of the famous incompleteness theorem, as well as the intellectual adventure of the philosophical foundation of mathematics that led to it.
Although the book contains the full text of the play Twelfth Night, the greater part of it consists of essays. In the first essay, the author discusses the broader issue of literary works that draw their subject matter from mathematics and then narrows this reflection down to the long journey that led him to The Seventeenth Night. In the second text, the author, adopting the form of dialogue, takes us on an extensive psycho-historical journey through the adventure of the foundation of mathematics. The development of this journey contains a fascinating paradox. Through the painstaking efforts of a few brilliant minds to solve the abstract philosophical problems of mathematics, the most practical and useful invention of the twentieth century was born: the computer.
As this book demonstrates in many ways, the journey that leads to Gödel and incompleteness is not merely a scientific inquiry, but at the same time a deeply human, agonising and heroic quest, from darkness to light, from absurdity to reason, from madness to algorithms.
Author:
Apostolos Doxiadis
Text editing:
Eleftheria Kopsida
Pages:
368
Dimensions:
14 x 21
ISBN:
978-960-8399-43-3
Publication:
2006
Categories:
Books, Essays & Thought, Δοκίμιο
Apostolos Doxiadis
Apostolos Doxiadis was born in Australia to Greek parents and grew up in Athens. He studied mathematics at Columbia University in New York and continued his postgraduate studies in Paris. Returning to Greece, he directed for the theatre and cinema. His second feature film, Terirem, won the International Confederation of Art Cinemas Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988.
He wrote the short stories Parallel Life (Agra, 1985), Makavettas (Estia, 1988, revised edition Ikaros, 2010), Uncle Peter and Goldbach’s Conjecture (Kastaniotis, 1993, revised edition 2001), The Three Little Men (Kastaniotis, 1998), as well as the play The Seventeenth Night, which was published alongside the essay From Insanity to Algorithms in the book of the same title (Ikaros, 2006).
In 2008, Ikaros published the highly successful graphic novel Logicomix, in collaboration with Christos Papadimitriou, Alekos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna, following five years of work. The book, which was first published in Greek, received rave reviews from readers and critics alike, and was soon followed by its publication in 22 countries around the world, turning it into a publishing phenomenon.
