From  mathematics to  fiction, to arts and to Logicomix
Famous Greeks

From mathematics to fiction, to arts and to Logicomix

Greek writer and director, Apostolos Doxiadis was born in Brisbane Australia in 1953 and grew up in Greece. Despite his initial interest in the novel and the arts, early in his life, «a sudden sensual attraction to maths» –as he says – led him to write an article which worked as an open door to Columbia University, in the city of New York at the age of 15. He studied Applied Mathematics at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, by constructing mathematical models of the nervous system. After completing his education, Doxiadis returned to the love of his adolescence: the writing, film and theater. He worked for some years as a director in theater and in 1983 he wraps his first film, “Underground Passage”. The second film, “Terirem” (1986), won the Best Works and Filmography at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival.
By the mid-80s, most of his work was fiction. He published four novels: Parallel Life (1985) Macbeth (1988), Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture (1992), The three little men (1997). Originally written in Greek, but his own translation in English on “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture” was published internationally in 2000.

Doxiadis now writes in both Greek and English, a process which he explains in his autobiographical report, entitled “What’s in a Name”. He also wrote – and directed the theatrical-musical play, “The Tragical History of Jackson Pollock, Abstract Expressionist” and he accompanied it by a set of texts and images entitled Paralipomena. He has also written the play “Incompleteness”, inspired by the incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gödel and the last days of the inventor’s life.

In 2008, Doxiadis released the novel, comic Logicomix, in collaboration with the Dr Christos Papadimitriou of the University of California, Berkeley in Computer Science and artists Alekos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. This work examines the history of mathematics, the 20th century, and, self-referentially, the lives of the authors and the history of the project’s creation.

The narrator and protagonist, is a great mathematician, philosopher and founder of epistemology Bertrand Russell. The cartoon was in 2009 a best-seller in the English Annex of Amazon, and received rave reviews from the major foreign newspapers.

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