Logical Thoughts on Logicomix

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Logical Thoughts on Logicomix<br>alternatively titled: 6 months at my *new* job

Muthu Aiswaryaa Swaminathan<br>Jun 03, 2026

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^ this post will almost certainly colour your interpretation of the graphic novel, Logicomix. if you’re planning to read the book (which you should!!), please feel free to read this post later!<br>I have been meaning to sit down and reflect about everything I have learnt in the last six months. I did get started with a list, and it was by large, a rundown of technical stuff. But I chanced upon quite the brazen book a few days ago; it held up a mirror to my face and challenged me and my list. All thanks to Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, my list won’t reach my five wonderful Substack readers in the near future. To me, the yardstick for a good book is 2-dimensional. The two dimensions are: how much fun I have while reading it, and how much it challenges my worldview. Logicomix has somehow performed extremely well in both dimensions. It was both absolutely delightful and hauntingly beautiful. At the origin is one question: What can we know to be objectively true? Something that is absolutely true, set in stone, something no one can rationally contradict?<br>Is it perhaps Mathematics? 1 + 1 is 2, this fact cannot be false, right? But what does 1 actually mean? In the world of mathematics, there are constructs that do not occur in the natural world, does 1 exist? what does it mean when a number is infinitesimally small? isn’t that a circular definition in itself? what even is infinity? an axiom is defined as “a fundamental statement or assumption accepted as true without the need for proof”, what if a number of these axioms we believe to be true are actually false? we build so many probabilistic models, but is it even possible to ascertain the probability of any material event in the real world? Is Mathematics still the objective truth? Or is it rather the product of years of rote calculation and assumptions that have somehow transcended time?<br>Enter Bertrand Russell, our protagonist, a mathematician and philosopher. In the present timeline of the story, Professor Russell is scheduled to deliver a lecture, but is disrupted by a group of isolationists who believe that the US must stay out of WW2. Russell is asked to take a stance on this situation: does he think the US must participate or not? what is the rational, logical choice? is there a logical choice? Through the rest of the book, we follow his answer to this question: his life’s journey as a logician, his struggles to discover the true foundations of mathematics.<br>Russell believes that every axiom must be proven, every assumption clearly stated and objectively true. In his life’s magnum opus, Principia Mathematica, Russell famously proves 1+1 equals 2 in 162 pages - his predicates first define ‘1’, ‘+’ and ‘=’ from first principles, building upward from a minimal set of explicit logical axioms. We encounter anecdotes, arguments and discussions with several mathematicians, Hilbert, Frege, Cantor, Whitehead, the charming Wittgenstein, and finally we see the end to this battle for certainty, in the form of Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Mathematics ends up proving that there is indeed ignorabimus (i.e., what we cannot know). The authors themselves are mathematicians, and concepts like Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel, Russell’s Paradox, and even Godel’s theorem are explained with such lucidity that any curious person will understand them. To me however what impressed me the most wasn’t the theorems or the explanations, but rather, the human component in the story.<br>The authors make the following argument: what drove these mathematicians to Logic is their fear of uncertainty and ambiguity. We see how passion and obssession can actually drive a person to madness. Most media we see these days has this habit of depicting passionate people with a revered, feverish glow that ultimately ends in success; we do not usually see the other side of this coin.

In these logicians’ fear of uncertainty, and pursuits for exactitude, I saw.. more than a glimpse of myself. Godel’s theorem was as much a blow to me as it was to them: if the perfectly formulated problems of Maths themselves cannot be proven to be right or wrong, what hope do we have for the problems of our real world? can one even make a genuinely rational or right decision? even more concerning, is there such a thing as a right decision?<br>I know for a fact that my kryptonite is my indecisiveness; when faced with a difficult decision, I often tend to go in circles, analyzing pros and cons, pitting one against another on imaginary weighing scales. Reading Logicomix made me realize the source of this indecisiveness. I seem to have internalized the idea that my decisions must be “right“ decisions, and not necessarily what I actually want to do. So whenever one of the choices isn’t objectively “the right thing to do”,...