Education
Mid-Career
- Intellectually precocious
- He entered Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to study mathematics.
- Part of a secret society named "the Apostles"
- Abandoned mathematics for philosophy
- Graduated with First Class distinction in philosophy
- He was elected a fellow of his college in 1895, with the thesis entitled "An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry"
Bertrand Russell
- In 1927, Russell and his wife started a school for young children named "Beacon Hill", which they carried on until 1932.
- He succeeded the earldom in 1931
- In 1938 he went to the United States and during the next years taught at many of the country's leading universities.
- In 1940 he was involved in legal proceedings when his right to teach philosophy at the College of the City of New York was questioned because of his views on morality.
- In 1944 Russell returned to Trinity College, where he lectured on the ideas that formed his last major contribution to philosophy.
Early childhood
- Full name is Bertrand Arthur William Russell
- Born at Trelleck, Monmouthshire, U.K. on 18th May, 1872.
- His parents were Viscount Amberley and Katherine, daughter of 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley.
- Came from an aristocratic family.
- Following the death of his mother (in 1874) and of his father (in 1876), Russell and his brother went to live with their grandparents.
- Awarded The Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
- During the 1950s and 1960s, Russell became something of an inspiration to large numbers of idealistic youth as a result of his continued anti-war and anti-nuclear protests.
- Together with Albert Einstein, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955
- In 1957, he was a prime organizer of the first Pugwash Conference, He became the founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958 and was once again imprisoned, this time in connection with anti-nuclear protests, in 1961.
- He remained a prominent public figure until his death nine years later at the age of 97.
Bibliography
Contribution to mathematics
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/
Bertrand_Arthur_William_Russell.aspx
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1950/russell-bio.html
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Bertrand-Russell
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Russell.html
Math through the Ages by William P. Berlinghoff and Fernando Q. Gouvea
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/
Early Career
His contributions relating to mathematics include his discovery of
- Russell's paradox
- His defence of logicism
- His introduction of the theory of types
- His refining and popularizing of the first-order predicate calculus.
- Along with Kurt Gödel, he is usually credited with being one of the two most important logicians of the twentieth century.
- Between late 1800s and early 1900s, Russell published several works which include:
German Social Democracy (1896)
The Principles of Mathematics (1903)
Principia Mathematica (1910)
- In 1910 he was appointed lecturer at Trinity College. His college deprived him of his lectureship in 1916.
- Two years later Russell was convicted a second time. This time he spent six months in prison. It was while in prison that he wrote his well-received Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919).
- In 1920 Russell had paid a short visit to Russia to study the conditions of Bolshevism on the spot. In the autumn of the same year, he went to China to lecture on philosophy at the Peking University.