I just finished reading Logicomix, which purports to tell the story that forms the bridge content in my degree course, between maths and philosophy: the search for foundations in mathematics in the wake of all the stuff that goes on in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I enjoyed reading it, but thought that it didn’t do justice to the story as I’ve learnt it as part of the philosophy of maths course I did in Michaelmas. The book is overly focused on Russell, who was an important guy, but this was at the cost of skimming over everyone else: Wittgenstein got a fair hearing (though since I’ve never studied him my judgement of that is not worth much), but Frege, Gödel and most importantly Hilbert didn’t really.

Supposedly the reason for this is that the book is aiming to tell a story about madness and to provide some concluding moral of its own to the whole quest but I didn’t really buy it; I couldn’t really tell what it wanted to say aside from “computer science is a pretty decent outcome of all this” which I’m not so bothered about.