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Alfred North Whitehead was borm at Ramsgate, England, in 1861, and was
educated at Sherborne School and Trinity college, Cambridge. He lectured on
mathematics at Trinity College from 1885 to 1911, and then on applied mathematics
and mechanics at University College of the university of London. He
was a professor of mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology
at the University of London from 1914 to 1924, after which he went to the
United States as a professor of philosophy at harvard
University, a post that he held until his retirement in 1936.
He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts in
1947. Like his most distinguished student, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead viewed
philosophy from the standpoint of mathematics, and together the two men
wrote their epochal Principia mathematica in the years 1910 to 1913. Whitehead
published a number of notably lucid works on mathematics and philosophy. |
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Bentrand Arthur William Russell, descendant of an aristocratic family, was born near Trelleck, Wales, in 1872. The winner of an open scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, he took high honors in mathematics and philosophy, and studied under Whitehead. In addition to lecturing, largely at universities in the United States, he wrote over forty books on mathematics, logic, philosophy,sociology, and education. He received many award, such as both the Sylvester and de Morgan medals of the Royal Society (1934), the Order of Merit |
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(1940), and the Nobel prize for Literature (1950).
His outspoken views
often embroiled him in controversies. During World War I, he was dismissed
from Cambridge University and imprisoned for four months because of his
pacifist views and his opposition to conscription. In the early 1960s, he led
pacifist moves to ban unclear weapons and was again briefly imprisoned. A man
of remarkable mind and ability, he died in 1970, mentally alert to the end, at the
advanced age of ninety-eight.
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