Bertrand Russell

[In Principia Mathematica] Russell and Whitehead suggested no new numbers or arithmetical rules, but they did try to show how the simplest numbers—integers—could be built using the principles of logic. But the methods they proposed for even the simplest sums were desperately cumbersome. And for the proof that 1+1=2, readers had to wait until volume II, page 83. --The Economist, When 1, 2, 3... is not enough: Arguments over what counts as a number, December 30, 2008


Logicism posits that the vast edifice of mathematics is nothing but a working out of logic, of the rules of reasoning. This was Bertrand Russell’s view, famously worked out with Alfred North Whitehead in Principia Mathematica. Most mathematicians and most philosophers of mathematics found the book unreadable and the argument unpersuasive. --Fernando Q. Gouvea, The Book of Numbers, First Things, February 2009, review of Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Earth to Russell: the limits of Russell's views on space exploration, by Chad Trainer, Philosophy Now, March/April 2003

Bertrand Russell: Prophet of the New World Order, by David J. Peterson, New Oxford Review, June 2000

Love, logic & unbearable pity: The private Bertrand Russell, by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, September 1992

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1950