Bertrand Russell
English philosopher and logician who co-wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics in logic Show bio
Bio
Bertrand Russell lost both parents by age four and grew up with his grandmother. He took from her a habit of standing up for principle that never left him. Russell had a lonely adolescence, and he later wrote that only mathematics kept him from suicide.
He won a scholarship to Cambridge and turned from mathematics toward philosophy there. Russell then tried, with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, to build mathematics from logic alone.
He helped found analytic philosophy, a school that put careful logical analysis first. Russell went to prison for his First World War pacifism, standing on principle as his grandmother taught.