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Bertrand Russell
(1872—1970) philosopher, journalist, and political campaigner
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Alan Turing
(1912–1954)British mathematician, who introduced the concept of the Turing machine.Born in London, he was educated at King's College, Cambridge, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1936. In the ...
chicken
A two-person strategic game (1), generally considered to be the prototype of a dangerous game. In its canonical interpretation, two motorists speed towards each other. Each has the option of swerving ...
David Hilbert
(1863–1943)German mathematician, a major contributor to most branches of modern mathematics.Born in Königsberg (East Prussia; now Kaliningrad, Russia), the son of a judge, Hilbert was educated at the ...
Dorothy Maud Wrinch
(1894–1976)Dorothy Maud Wrinch was born in Rosario, Argentina on 13 September 1894 and died in Falmouth, Massachusetts on 11 February 1976. Daughter of Ada Souter and the British engineer ...
foundations of mathematics
The study of the logical basis for mathematics, and in particular attempts to establish an axiomatic basis upon which mathematics could be built. Euclid's geometrical text the Elements is one of the ...
Godfrey Harold Hardy
(1877–1947; b. Cranleigh, England; d. Cambridge, England)English mathematician. Hardy graduated from Cambridge U in 1898. Elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1900, the first edition of ...
Henri Poincaré
(1854–1912)Frenchmathematician. From 1889 he worked on the three-body problem in both its general and restricted forms, and showed that there are no exact solutions to the n-body problem. He expanded ...
John Venn
(1834–1923)British logician who, in his work Symbolic Logic of 1881, introduced what are now called Venn diagrams.
Joseph Rotblat
Sir Joseph (Józef) Rotblat (1908–2005) was born in Warsaw to a well-to-do Jewish family. His father’s business, however, was destroyed during World War I. As a child Rotblat experienced hunger ...
knowledge by acquaintance, and knowledge by description
This distinction was made by Bertrand Russell (see especially Russell 1914: 151). Knowledge by acquaintance is ‘what we derive from sense’, which does not imply ‘even the smallest “knowledge about” ’ ...
mind–body problem
The philosophical problem, usually attributed to the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) of explaining the apparent interaction of mental and physical events, which appear to belong to two ...
naïve set theory
The area of mathematics which attempts to formalize the nature of a set using a min.imal number of independent axioms. Bertrand * Russell worked in this area, but discovered that paradoxes appear, ...
Norbert Wiener
(1894–1964)US mathematician, the founder of cybernetics.The son of a Harvard professor of Slavonic languages and literature, Wiener was born in Columbia, Montana. A mathematical infant prodigy, he ...
perception
The interpretation of sensory information using both the raw data detected by the senses and previous experience. Compare sensation.
Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Quick reference
A Dictionary of Scientists
(1872–1970) British philosopher and mathematician
Russell, who was born at Trelleck, England, was orphaned at an early age and brought up in the home of his grandfather, the ...
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Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (1872–1970) Reference library
Richard L. Gregory
The Oxford Companion to the Mind (2 ed.)
By general consent the most distinguished philosopher of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell made fundamental contributions to logic, and influenced equally academic and popular philosophy, ...
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Russell's paradox
The most famous paradox of set theory. Some sets are members of themselves and others are not: for example, the set of all sets is a member of itself, because it is a set, whereas the set of all ...
Russell's philosophy of mind: dualism
When Russell wrote about the mind, his gaze was also fixed on the physical world beyond it, because he wanted to explain how minds can acquire knowledge of what lies ...
Russell's philosophy of mind: neutral monism
The philosophy of mind adopted by Russell in his middle period was neutral monism, which denies that there is any irreducible difference between the mental and the physical and tries ...
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge
(1851–1940) British physicist,who became principal of the then-new Birmingham University in 1900. His best-known work was in radio, particularly his invention in 1894 of the ‘coherer’, used as a ...
