The phone call that never happened

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.

Logicomix, completed after five years of work, is by Apostolos Doxiadis, author of the international bestseller Uncle Peter and Goldbach’s Conjecture — the book described by The Independent as “the genesis of the genre of mathematical fiction”— and the renowned computer scientist and professor at the University of Berkeley, Christos H. Papadimitriou, whilst the sketches and colouring are by Alekos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, animation artists returning to their first love, comics. The book is both a novel and a comic, history and fiction, a fairy tale and an essay. A group of friends in modern-day Athens – who are none other than the book’s creators – attempt both to narrate and to comprehend the great adventure of the search for the Foundations of Mathematics, an adventure that has left an indelible mark on our era. Is it, as one of them says, a tragic story, indeed on the scale of an ancient tragedy? Or, as another believes, a thoroughly optimistic tale? In Logicomix, distances are bridged. Spanning six decades, the book narrates in a completely original way the epic story of a quest in which most of the heroes paid a heavy price for knowledge, often descending into madness. The role of narrator is played by the most fascinating character in the story, the great mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Drawing on his own life, we see the history of the quest for the Foundations through the emotional turmoil, the dramatic historical events and the ideological disputes that fuelled it. The adventures of the great thinkers who play a leading role in this quest—Frege, Hilbert, Poincaré, Wittgenstein, Gödel and Turing, come to life through their relationships with Russell and his own passionate engagement with the quest, and are led, through their connection with him, to a climax that coincides with the most dramatic moment in the history of the twentieth century. Logicomix is also available as an app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. www.logicomix.com

The setting of the narrative is the base of the 7th Armoured Brigade, during the years of the dictatorship, where Colonel Stamatis Xirias (also known as ‘Gorillas’) suddenly surrounds the camp with tanks and makes demands of the President. The Revolutionary Council convenes urgently and the snake is called upon to slither out of its hole – who else! – Lieutenant Colonel Achilleas Makavettas, who arrives in Karditsa for this very purpose at the head of a small team of elite soldiers. Questions abound: what is Makavettas’s half-paralysed sister, Eurycleia, trying to eavesdrop on behind the closed doors of the rooms at the ‘Asteria’ hotel? What role does the young starlet Zeza Fili, leading lady of Greek-American John Hector’s “national” blockbusters, actually play? What motives drive the mysterious Captains Zivos, Bountova and Christopoulos, and who, ultimately, make up the notorious ‘phantom organisation’ of the Zealots? New faces have joined the cast of the drama, and the game of power will be played out on an open stage.

Apostolos Doxiadis, writing about the history of Nasos Vagenas’s short story ‘Patroklos Giatras and the Greek translations of The Waste Land’, its background and influence, he explores the central theme of repetition in literature. T. S. Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land (1922) gave rise to George Seferis’s The Waste Land (1936), which, together with an idea by Borges, gave rise to Nasos Vagenas’s short story (1972). This gave rise to The Desolate Earth (1984), Ilias Lagios’s fictional reconstruction of the epic poem that Giatras never managed to write, and this, together with the preceding works, gave rise to A. T. Elís’s The Ready Land (2016) by A. T. Elis, which demystifies the previous visions, setting its scene in present-day Greece... The book includes an essay by Apostolos Doxiadis and the four texts it discusses: the short story by Nasos Vagenas, The Deserted Country in Seferis’s translation, The Deserted Land by Lagios, and The Ready Country by Elies. The volume is rounded off with Giorgos Giatromanolakis’s afterword, ‘Writers: agents of the mind or a horde of enthusiasts’, which, amongst other things, summarises the profound relevance and coherence of these texts.

‘I called my narrative a “myth-story” because, as I wrote, I realised that the reconstruction of the past relies not only on memory, but also on imagination—an active imagination that can dredge up emotions without, however, distorting the facts.’ Apostolos Doxiadis recounts his life from his early childhood through to adulthood. At the heart of the narrative he places politics, observation, lived experience and, later, action. In an environment that is constantly changing for the worse, a child tries to understand what the adults around him are experiencing as an unstable parliamentary democracy, shaping his character and ideas through constant interaction with events. The coup of April 1967 brings dramatic changes to the country and to the narrator’s family. The height of the student movement finds him actively involved in the resistance against the dictatorship, within a Left characterised by grand visions and endless disputes, engaged in a struggle that at times seems thrilling and at others hopeless, yet always necessary and dangerous.

...As he walks with his head bowed, he suddenly spots a ‘dime’ on the ground—a ten-cent coin, which was used in America at the time as a telephone coin. He picks up the coin and runs back to the phone box. He closes the door, grabs the receiver and drops the coin into the machine whilst his hand moves towards the dial. But just as he is about to dial the first digit of a number, he stops. The expression on his face changes, from joy to sorrow. He leaves the receiver hanging and goes back out. But why didn’t he make the call? From this question, which is posed by a black-and-white student short film, Apostolos Doxiadis embarks on an investigation that in many ways resembles a police inquiry, attempting to uncover the cause of a great, still unhealed, sorrow. He moves from the present day to 1968, from Athens to Washington and back again, with real and fictional characters intertwining, seeking an answer that will unlock the mystery and bring healing. But the answer takes on deceptive forms. Somewhere between fiction and autobiography, confession and analysis, The Phone Call That Never Was is both a narrative and a reference to a person who, whilst playing the leading role in the story, is systematically concealed from the author and the reader.