In these average times, full of mediocre products, mediocre media and mediocre mediocrity, there are still lights in the dark. These lights push their fields forward, by inventing a new way of thinking, doing and presenting. By being bold and inventive, rising all hopes for humanity again. And NO, I’m not exaggerating, the world would be double doomed without these people.

Well then. The first light in the dark is ‘Logicomix‘. This graphic novel tells the quest for the true face of mathematics, which sounds boring but isn’t since the quest is conducted by the overwhelming charming English professor Bertrand Russell. As a philosopher, logicus, and notorious pacifist, he uses logic to try to save mathematics, and humanity. His adventure is portrayed as if the fate of the world depends on it, a long and intense journey during which Russell must battle his inner demons to achieve the task.

His most famous contribution to the logic field is known as Russell’s paradox: imagine there is a town with one barber, and where the law states that everyone who doesn’t shave himself is shaved by the barber. Who shaves the barber? If he doesn’t shave himself he shaves himself, and if he shaves himself he doesn’t shave himself. We are led into a contradiction. It may seem funny (and it is), but its effect on the philosophy of mathematics was devastating. Contradiction is a fatal bullet wound for any logical system, and it seemed to kill off hope for a watertight foundation for mathematics. With his next book, the Principia Mathematica, Russell tried to repair the damage he had inflicted on his own dream. This book is probably the most impenetrable one ever written by a winner of the Nobel prize for literature. In it, he and the co-author Alfred North Whitehead, famously take 362 pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2. Yes, Logicomix also deals with the border between logic and madness.

What I like about ‘Logicomix’, is that the authors tell the story with humour and a lightness of touch that pokes fun at the philosophers and mathematicians involved, but never trivialises the philosophy or the mathematics. The novel is both tongue-in-cheek and profound. Also smart is the fact that the authors let Russell interact with figures he never met, but whose ideas influenced his theories. The novel is loaded with these and other mental interactions. A nice autumn present for anyone who has ever been passionate about something.

And the second light, speaks for itself.

VIDEOGIOCO by Donato Sansone from Enrico Ascoli – Sound Design