Christos H. Papadimitriou - Böcker

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.

Clearly written graduate-level text considers the Soviet ellipsoid algorithm for linear programming; efficient algorithms for network flow, matching, spanning trees, and matroids; the theory of NP-complete problems; approximation algorithms, local search heuristics for NP-complete problems, more. "Mathematicians wishing a self-contained introduction need look no further." — American Mathematical Monthly. 1982 edition.

This volume commemorates the life, work and foundational views of Kurt Gödel (1906-78), most famous for his hallmark works on the completeness of first-order logic, the incompleteness of number theory, and the consistency - with the other widely accepted axioms of set theory - of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum hypothesis. It explores current research, advances and ideas for future directions not only in the foundations of mathematics and logic, but also in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence, physics, cosmology, philosophy, theology and the history of science. The discussion is supplemented by personal reflections from several scholars who knew Gödel personally, providing some interesting insights into his life. By putting his ideas and life's work into the context of current thinking and perceptions, this book will extend the impact of Gödel's fundamental work in mathematics, logic, philosophy and other disciplines for future generations of researchers.