N.A.
Whitehead
1861-1947
Alfred Whitehead was a mathematician
and philosopher who collaborated with Bertrand Russell.
Whitehead was taught at home until he was 14 when he entered Sherbourne
School. He showed a special gift for mathematics and was allowed to devote
extra time to that subject.
Whitehead entered (1880) Trinity College, Cambridge, and attended only
mathematics lectures. Elected to a fellowship in 1884 with a dissertation
on Maxwell's theory of electricity
and magnetism. He soon became more interested in pure mathematics and published
the Treatise on Universal Algebra in 1898. He remained at Cambridge
until 1910.
He had in some sense not made the grade in mathematics and had little prospects
of a mathematics chair at Cambridge so he moved to the University of London.
While in London he wrote the popular mathematics book An introduction
to mathematics . In 1914 he became professor of applied mathematics
at Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. In 1924 he accepted
a chair in philosophy at Harvard University, where he taught until retirement
in 1937.
Whitehead was working on a second volume of Universal Algebra which
he abandoned in 1903. Bertrand Russell was Whitehead's student and in 1903
they began work on the 3 volume work Principia Mathematica (1910-
1913). This attempted to construct the foundations of mathematics on a
rigorous logical basis.
As this work neared completion, Whitehead turned his attention to the philosophy
of science. This interest arose out of the attempt to explain the relation
of formal mathematical theories in physics to their basis in experience
and was sparked by the revolution brought on by Einstein's
general theory of relativity. In The Principle of Relativity (1922),
Whitehead presented an alternative to Einstein's views.
Science and the Modern World (1925), a series of lectures given
in the United States, served as an introduction to his later metaphysics.
Whitehead's most important book, Process and Reality (1929), took
this theory to a level of even greater generality.
