Christos H. Papadimitriou

En dramatisk historie om fornuft og galskap, krig og kjærlighet. Denne særpregede tegneserieromanen handler om matematikeren og filosofen Bertrand Russels liv, hans genialitet og hans nitide søken etter det logiske grunnlaget for matematikken. Og kanskje var det de gåtefulle fortielsene om dystre familiehemmeligheter som lå til grunn for hans streben etter forklaring, visshet og sannhet. På sin sannhetssøkende vei møter Russel anerkjente tenkere som Gotlob Frege, David Hilbert og Kurt Gõdel og han får en ivrig elev i Ludwig Wittgenstein. Men det er som de lysende formuleringene stadig unndrar seg, til tross for hans utrettelige arbeid med å knuse både egne og andre store tenkeres tanker. Så besatt av sitt logiske prosjekt er han, at det truer med å ødelegge for hans vitenskapelige anseelse og personlige lykke. Han lar seg regelrett drive til randen av galskap. Dette er en historisk roman og en annerledes innføring i flere av matematikkens og filosofiens mest tankeknuste ideer: Gjennomuttrykksfulle tegninger og presis tekst, gjør denne boken det mulig å finne klarhet og visshet om det som de aller fleste av oss lar forbli uavklart og uvisst.

This brilliantly illustrated tale of reason, insanity, love and truth recounts the story of Bertrand Russell's life. Raised by his paternal grandparents, young Russell was never told the whereabouts of his parents. Driven by a desire for knowledge of his own history, he attempted to force the world to yield to his yearnings: for truth, clarity and resolve. As he grew older, and increasingly sophisticated as a philosopher and mathematician, Russell strove to create an objective language with which to describe the world - one free of the biases and slippages of the written word. At the same time, he began courting his first wife, teasing her with riddles and leaning on her during the darker days, when his quest was bogged down by paradoxes, frustrations and the ghosts of his family's secrets. Ultimately, he found considerable success - but his career was stalled when he was outmatched by an intellectual rival: his young, strident, brilliantly original student, Ludwig Wittgenstein. An insightful and complexly layered narrative, Logicomix reveals both Russell's inner struggle and the quest for the foundations of logic. Narration by an older, wiser Russell, as well as asides from the author himself, make sense of the story's heady and powerful ideas. At its heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict between pure reason and the persistent flaws of reality, a narrative populated by great and august thinkers, young lovers, ghosts and insanity.

The world of computation according to Turing, an interactive tutoring program, as told to star-crossed lovers: a novel. Our hero is Turing, an interactive tutoring program and namesake (or virtual emanation?) of Alan Turing, World War II code breaker and father of computer science. In this unusual novel, Turing's idiosyncratic version of intellectual history from a computational point of view unfolds in tandem with the story of a love affair involving Ethel, a successful computer executive, Alexandros, a melancholy archaeologist, and Ian, a charismatic hacker. After Ethel (who shares her first name with Alan Turing's mother) abandons Alexandros following a sundrenched idyll on Corfu, Turing appears on Alexandros's computer screen to unfurl a tutorial on the history of ideas. He begins with the philosopher-mathematicians of ancient Greece-"discourse, dialogue, argument, proof... can only thrive in an egalitarian society"-and the Arab scholar in ninth-century Baghdad who invented algorithms; he moves on to many other topics, including cryptography and artificial intelligence, even economics and developmental biology. (These lessons are later critiqued amusingly and developed further in postings by a fictional newsgroup in the book's afterword.) As Turing's lectures progress, the lives of Alexandros, Ethel, and Ian converge in dramatic fashion, and the story takes us from Corfu to Hong Kong, from Athens to San Francisco-and of course to the Internet, the disruptive technological and social force that emerges as the main locale and protagonist of the novel. Alternately pedagogical and romantic, Turing (A Novel about Computation) should appeal both to students and professionals who want a clear and entertaining account of the development of computation and to the general reader who enjoys novels of ideas.

A text for a range of graduate courses, with some of the material suitable for students of computer science with a background in the theory of algorithms and some suitable for those with a background in operations research. Corrected and unabridged from the 1982 publication by Prentice-Hall, with a