Alfred North Whitehead
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw mathematics and philosophy draw unusually close together, as thinkers pushed logic toward formal precision while also asking large questions about the nature of reality. Alfred North Whitehead was born on 15 February 1861 in Ramsgate and became one of the figures working across that double terrain.
Educated at Sherborne School and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, Whitehead worked as a mathematician, logician, physicist, philosopher, theologian, and university teacher — a range that was unusual even by the ambitious standards of his era. He wrote Principia Mathematica, The Concept of Nature (1920), and Process and Reality, contributing across fields that don't always share the same readership. He held UK citizenship and worked in English throughout his career, dying on 30 December 1947 in Cambridge.
The honours Whitehead received reflect how broadly his work was taken seriously. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the British Academy, and he received the Sylvester Medal, the Butler Medal, and the Order of Merit. He was also awarded the James Scott Prize Lectureship and honorary doctorates from both the University of St Andrews and Harvard University. That last honour, from Harvard, came late in a career that had by then stretched across mathematics, natural philosophy, and metaphysics alike.
Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead's insights on:
In formal logic, a contradiction is a signal of defeat: but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty. and of intellectual distinction, and of beauty.
I think that our power of conscious origination is where free will comes in...We are originally choosing between the good and the less good, whether aware of it or not.
Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the groading urgency of contingent happenings.
Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.
The invention of the differential calculus marks a crisis in the history of mathematics. The progress of science is divided between periods characterized by a slow accumulation of ideas and periods, when, owing to the new material for thought thus patiently collected, some genius by the invention of a new method or a new point of view, suddenly transforms the whole subject on to a higher level.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because you lap is warmer.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.