Mathematics

Bertrand Russell

1872 to 1970, Trellech, Wales

Logicism, the paradox, and the theory of descriptions - a logician who tried to build mathematics from logic and carried its rigour into the defence of reason and peace.

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Lessons

Logicism: Mathematics Is Only Logic Grown Up

Russell’s great program in Principia Mathematica : the claim that mathematics is not a separate science built on its own axioms but a branch of logic, so that every truth of arithmetic can be derived from purely l…

Russell’s Paradox: The Set That Broke Set Theory

The contradiction Russell found in 1901 - the class of all classes that are not members of themselves - which shattered Frege’s logical system, exposed a crack in the foundations of mathematics, and forced Russell…

The Theory of Descriptions: Dissolving the King of France

Russell’s 1905 analysis in ‘On Denoting’ - how a sentence like ‘the present King of France is bald’ can be meaningful and false even though there is no King of France, by treating definite…

Logical Atomism: Building the World from Facts

Russell’s vision of analysis as method - that the world is made of atomic facts to be reached by logical dissection, that inferred entities should be replaced by logical constructions from what we directly know, a…

The Public Philosopher: What a Logician Owes the World

Russell’s life beyond logic - the ethics of belief that grows from his commitment to evidence, his defiant humanism in the face of a purposeless universe, his pacifism and imprisonment, and the Nobel Prize that cr…

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