Word: mathematica
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although far less ambitious and comprehensive than Clark's biography, My Father, Bertrand Russell succeeds better in bringing the man into focus. Katharine Tait, Russell's daughter by Dora, understands what linked the brilliant young nationalist of the Principia Mathematica (who with his teacher Whitehead and his student Wittgenstein redirected modern philosophy away from German idealism) to the political and sexual provocateur of later years: "All his life he sought perfection: perfect mathematical truth, perfect philosophical clarity, a perfect formula for society, and a perfect woman to live with in a perfect human relationship...
Joong Fang Editor, Philosophia Mathematica Norfolk...
...primacy and gave weight to the workings of his large and sometimes foolish heart. Skeptic, agnostic and above all rationalist, he won his first fame as a mathematician, later as a philosopher by creatively applying mathematical methods to the linguistic mysteries of meaning. His most notable work, Principia Mathematica, written with the collaboration of his fellow mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, is a bench mark of 20th century philosophy. Paradoxically, though, Russell was less a man of the 20th century than the last of the eminent, eccentric Victorian rebels...
...work, The Principles of Mathematics, at the breakneck rate of 200,000 words in three months. The book was designed to liberate numbers from the mystique that had clung to them since the days of Pythagoras and to demonstrate that all mathematics derives from logic. The three-volume Principia Mathematica took Russell and Whitehead ten years. Most of it is completely inaccessible to non-mathematicians, but not all. For example, it contains a careful explication of what is generally considered Russell's greatest philosophical "discovery": the Theory of Descriptions...