127 Facts About Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Bertrand Russell was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians, and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G E Moore and his student and protege Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic.

Bertrand Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League.

Bertrand Russell went to prison for his pacifism during World War I, but saw the war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany as a necessary "lesser of two evils".

In 1950, Bertrand Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".

Bertrand Russell was the recipient of the De Morgan Medal, Sylvester Medal, Kalinga Prize, and Jerusalem Prize.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire, United Kingdom, on 18 May 1872, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy.

Bertrand Russell often feared the ridicule of his maternal grandmother, one of the campaigners for education of women.

In June 1874, Bertrand Russell's mother died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachel's death.

Frank and Bertrand Russell were placed in the care of staunchly Victorian paternal grandparents, who lived at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park.

The atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge was one of frequent prayer, emotional repression and formality; Frank reacted to this with open rebellion, but the young Bertrand Russell learned to hide his feelings.

Bertrand Russell remarked in his autobiography that his keenest interests in "nature and books and mathematics saved me from complete despondency;" only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide.

Bertrand Russell was educated at home by a series of tutors.

When Bertrand Russell was eleven years old, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love".

Bertrand Russell travelled to the continent in 1890 with an American friend, Edward FitzGerald, and with FitzGerald's family he visited the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and climbed the Eiffel Tower soon after it was completed.

Bertrand Russell won a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, and began his studies there in 1890, taking as coach Robert Rumsey Webb.

Bertrand Russell became acquainted with the younger George Edward Moore and came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the Cambridge Apostles.

Bertrand Russell quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating as seventh Wrangler in the former in 1893 and becoming a Fellow in the latter in 1895.

Bertrand Russell was 17 years old in the summer of 1889 when he met the family of Alys Pearsall Smith, an American Quaker five years older, who was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia.

Bertrand Russell became a friend of the Pearsall Smith family.

Bertrand Russell soon fell in love with the puritanical, high-minded Alys, and contrary to his grandmother's wishes, married her on 13 December 1894.

Bertrand Russell asked him if he loved her and he replied that he did not.

Bertrand Russell began his published work in 1896 with German Social Democracy, a study in politics that was an early indication of a lifelong interest in political and social theory.

Bertrand Russell was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

Bertrand Russell now started an intensive study of the foundations of mathematics at Trinity.

Bertrand Russell attended the First International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in 1900 where he met Giuseppe Peano and Alessandro Padoa.

Bertrand Russell was impressed by the precision of Peano's arguments at the Congress, read the literature upon returning to England, and came upon Bertrand Russell's paradox.

At the age of 29, in February 1901, Bertrand Russell underwent what he called a "sort of mystic illumination", after witnessing Whitehead's wife's acute suffering in an angina attack.

Bertrand Russell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1908.

Bertrand Russell was considered for a Fellowship, which would give him a vote in the college government and protect him from being fired for his opinions, but was passed over because he was "anti-clerical", essentially because he was agnostic.

Bertrand Russell was approached by the Austrian engineering student Ludwig Wittgenstein, who became his PhD student.

Bertrand Russell viewed Wittgenstein as a genius and a successor who would continue his work on logic.

Bertrand Russell spent hours dealing with Wittgenstein's various phobias and his frequent bouts of despair.

Bertrand Russell later described this, in Free Thought and Official Propaganda, as an illegitimate means the state used to violate freedom of expression.

Bertrand Russell championed the case of Eric Chappelow, a poet jailed and abused as a conscientious objector.

Bertrand Russell played a significant part in the Leeds Convention in June 1917, a historic event which saw well over a thousand "anti-war socialists" gather; many being delegates from the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Party, united in their pacifist beliefs and advocating a peace settlement.

The international press reported that Bertrand Russell appeared with a number of Labour Members of Parliament, including Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, as well as former Liberal MP and anti-conscription campaigner, Professor Arnold Lupton.

Bertrand Russell was reinstated to Trinity in 1919, resigned in 1920, was Tarner Lecturer in 1926 and became a Fellow again in 1944 until 1949.

In 1924, Bertrand Russell again gained press attention when attending a "banquet" in the House of Commons with well-known campaigners, including Arnold Lupton, who had been an MP and had endured imprisonment for "passive resistance to military or naval service".

Hardy writes that Bertrand Russell's dismissal had created a scandal since the vast majority of the Fellows of the College opposed the decision.

In January 1920, it was announced that Bertrand Russell had accepted the reinstatement offer from Trinity and would begin lecturing from October.

In July 1920, Bertrand Russell applied for a one year leave of absence; this was approved.

Bertrand Russell spent the year giving lectures in China and Japan.

In January 1921, it was announced by Trinity that Bertrand Russell had resigned and his resignation had been accepted.

The reason for the resignation, according to Hardy, was that Bertrand Russell was going through a tumultuous time in his personal life with a divorce and subsequent remarriage.

Bertrand Russell contemplated asking Trinity for another one-year leave of absence but decided against it, since this would have been an "unusual application" and the situation had the potential to snowball into another controversy.

In 1925, Bertrand Russell was asked by the Council of Trinity College to give the Tarner Lectures on the Philosophy of the Sciences; these would later be the basis for one of Bertrand Russell's best-received books according to Hardy: The Analysis of Matter, published in 1927.

Bertrand Russell met Vladimir Lenin and had an hour-long conversation with him.

Bertrand Russell's experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for the revolution.

Bertrand Russell subsequently wrote a book, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, about his experiences on this trip, taken with a group of 24 others from the UK, all of whom came home thinking well of the Soviet regime, despite Russell's attempts to change their minds.

Bertrand Russell went with optimism and hope, seeing China as then being on a new path.

Bertrand Russell arranged a hasty divorce from Alys, marrying Dora six days after the divorce was finalised, on 27 September 1921.

Bertrand Russell supported his family during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics, ethics, and education to the layman.

Bertrand Russell was not satisfied with the old traditional education and thought that progressive education had some flaws; as a result, together with Dora, Russell founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927.

In 1927 Bertrand Russell met Barry Fox, who became a well-known Gestalt therapist and writer in later years.

On 18 January 1936, Bertrand Russell married his third wife, an Oxford undergraduate named Patricia Spence, who had been his children's governess since 1930.

Bertrand Russell returned in 1937 to the London School of Economics to lecture on the science of power.

Bertrand Russell concluded that Adolf Hitler taking over all of Europe would be a permanent threat to democracy.

Bertrand Russell soon joined the Barnes Foundation, lecturing to a varied audience on the history of philosophy; these lectures formed the basis of A History of Western Philosophy.

Bertrand Russell participated in many broadcasts over the BBC, particularly The Brains Trust and for the Third Programme, on various topical and philosophical subjects.

En route to one of his lectures in Trondheim, Bertrand Russell was one of 24 survivors of an aeroplane crash in Hommelvik in October 1948.

Bertrand Russell said he owed his life to smoking since the people who drowned were in the non-smoking part of the plane.

In 1942, Bertrand Russell argued in favour of a moderate socialism, capable of overcoming its metaphysical principles.

In 1943, Bertrand Russell expressed support for Zionism: "I have come gradually to see that, in a dangerous and largely hostile world, it is essential to Jews to have some country which is theirs, some region where they are not suspected aliens, some state which embodies what is distinctive in their culture".

Just after the atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bertrand Russell wrote letters, and published articles in newspapers from 1945 to 1948, stating clearly that it was morally justified and better to go to war against the USSR using atomic bombs while the United States possessed them and before the USSR did.

In September 1949, one week after the USSR tested its first A-bomb, but before this became known, Bertrand Russell wrote that USSR would be unable to develop nuclear weapons because following Stalin's purges only science based on Marxist principles would be practised in the Soviet Union.

Bertrand Russell wrote a foreword to Words and Things by Ernest Gellner, which was highly critical of the later thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and of ordinary language philosophy.

Gilbert Ryle refused to have the book reviewed in the philosophical journal Mind, which caused Bertrand Russell to respond via The Times.

Bertrand Russell merely smiled, but afterwards claimed that the reply "That's right, just like your brother" immediately came to mind.

In 1950, Bertrand Russell attended the inaugural conference for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded anti-communist organisation committed to the deployment of culture as a weapon during the Cold War.

Bertrand Russell was one of the best-known patrons of the Congress, until he resigned in 1956.

In 1952, Bertrand Russell was divorced by Spence, with whom he had been very unhappy.

Bertrand Russell married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, soon after the divorce, on 15 December 1952.

In September 1961, at the age of 89, Bertrand Russell was jailed for seven days in Brixton Prison for a "breach of the peace" after taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London.

In 1962 Bertrand Russell played a public role in the Cuban Missile Crisis: in an exchange of telegrams with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev assured him that the Soviet government would not be reckless.

Bertrand Russell criticised the American press for failing to heed any voices critical of the official version.

Bertrand Russell was opposed to war from a young age; his opposition to World War I being used as grounds for his dismissal from Trinity College at Cambridge.

Bertrand Russell later described the resolution of these issues as essential to freedom of thought and expression, citing the incident in Free Thought and Official Propaganda, where he explained that the expression of any idea, even the most obviously "bad", must be protected not only from direct State intervention, but economic leveraging and other means of being silenced:.

Bertrand Russell spent the 1950s and 1960s engaged in political causes primarily related to nuclear disarmament and opposing the Vietnam War.

Bertrand Russell wrote a great many letters to world leaders during this period.

Bertrand Russell proposed in 1894 that the state issue certificates of health to prospective parents and withhold public benefits from those considered unfit.

On 20 November 1948, in a public speech at Westminster School, addressing a gathering arranged by the New Commonwealth, Bertrand Russell shocked some observers by suggesting that a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union was justified.

Bertrand Russell argued that war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable, so it would be a humanitarian gesture to get it over with quickly and have the United States in the dominant position.

Currently, Bertrand Russell argued, humanity could survive such a war, whereas a full nuclear war after both sides had manufactured large stockpiles of more destructive weapons was likely to result in the extinction of the human race.

Bertrand Russell later relented from this stance, instead arguing for mutual disarmament by the nuclear powers.

In 1956, immediately before and during the Suez Crisis, Bertrand Russell expressed his opposition to European imperialism in the Middle East.

Bertrand Russell viewed the crisis as another reminder of the pressing need for a more effective mechanism for international governance, and to restrict national sovereignty to places such as the Suez Canal area "where general interest is involved".

In November 1957 Russell wrote an article addressing US President Dwight D Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, urging a summit to consider "the conditions of co-existence".

In January 1958 Bertrand Russell elaborated his views in The Observer, proposing a cessation of all nuclear weapons production, with the UK taking the first step by unilaterally suspending its own nuclear-weapons program if necessary, and with Germany "freed from all alien armed forces and pledged to neutrality in any conflict between East and West".

Bertrand Russell was asked by The New Republic, a liberal American magazine, to elaborate his views on world peace.

Bertrand Russell urged that all nuclear weapons testing and flights by planes armed with nuclear weapons be halted immediately, and negotiations be opened for the destruction of all hydrogen bombs, with the number of conventional nuclear devices limited to ensure a balance of power.

Bertrand Russell proposed that Germany be reunified and accept the Oder-Neisse line as its border, and that a neutral zone be established in Central Europe, consisting at the minimum of Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, with each of these countries being free of foreign troops and influence, and prohibited from forming alliances with countries outside the zone.

Bertrand Russell suggested Western recognition of the People's Republic of China, and that it be admitted to the UN with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

Bertrand Russell was in contact with Lionel Rogosin while the latter was filming his anti-war film Good Times, Wonderful Times in the 1960s.

Bertrand Russell became a hero to many of the youthful members of the New Left.

In early 1963, Bertrand Russell became increasingly vocal in his disapproval of the Vietnam War, and felt that the US government's policies there were near-genocidal.

In June 1955, Bertrand Russell had leased Plas Penrhyn in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merionethshire, Wales and on 5 July of the following year it became his and Edith's principal residence.

Bertrand Russell published his three-volume autobiography in 1967,1968, and 1969.

Bertrand Russell made a cameo appearance playing himself in the anti-war Hindi film Aman, by Mohan Kumar, which was released in India in 1967.

On 31 January 1970, Bertrand Russell issued a statement condemning "Israel's aggression in the Middle East", and in particular, Israeli bombing raids being carried out deep in Egyptian territory as part of the War of Attrition, which he compared to German bombing raids in the Battle of Britain and the US bombing of Vietnam.

Bertrand Russell called for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-Six-Day War borders.

Bertrand Russell's body was cremated in Colwyn Bay on 5 February 1970 with five people present.

Bertrand Russell authored several essays about her father; as well as a book, My Father, Bertrand Russell, which was published in 1975.

Bertrand Russell first married Alys Whitall Smith in 1894.

Bertrand Russell held throughout his life the following styles and honours:.

Bertrand Russell is generally credited with being one of the founders of analytic philosophy.

Bertrand Russell was deeply impressed by Gottfried Leibniz, and wrote on every major area of philosophy except aesthetics.

Bertrand Russell was particularly prolific in the fields of metaphysics, logic and the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, ethics and epistemology.

On ethics, Bertrand Russell wrote that he was a utilitarian in his youth, yet he later distanced himself from this view.

Bertrand Russell described himself in 1947 as an agnostic or an atheist: he found it difficult to determine which term to adopt, saying:.

For most of his adult life, Bertrand Russell maintained religion to be little more than superstition and, despite any positive effects, largely harmful to people.

Bertrand Russell believed that religion and the religious outlook serve to impede knowledge and foster fear and dependency, and to be responsible for much of our world's wars, oppression, and misery.

Bertrand Russell was a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association and President of Cardiff Humanists until his death.

Bertrand Russell remained politically active almost to the end of his life, writing to and exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various causes.

Bertrand Russell was a prominent campaigner against Western intervention into the Vietnam War in the 1960s, writing essays, books, attending demonstrations, and even organising Russell Tribunal in 1966 alongside other prominent philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which fed into his 1967 book War Crimes in Vietnam.

Bertrand Russell argued for a "scientific society", where war would be abolished, population growth would be limited, and prosperity would be shared.

Bertrand Russell suggested the establishment of a "single supreme world government" able to enforce peace, claiming that "the only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation".

Bertrand Russell expressed support for guild socialism, and commented positively on several socialist thinkers and activists.

Bertrand Russell was a liberal in that he opposed concentrations of power in all its manifestations, military, governmental, or religious, as well as the superstitious or nationalist ideas that usually serve as its justification.

Dyson's 1958 letter to The Times calling for a change in the law regarding male homosexual practices, which were partly legalised in 1967, when Bertrand Russell was still alive.

Bertrand Russell expressed sympathy and support for the Palestinian people and was strongly critical of Israel's actions.

Bertrand Russell was a champion of freedom of opinion and an opponent of both censorship and indoctrination.

Bertrand Russell has presented ideas on the possible means of control of education in case of scientific dictatorship governments, of the kind of this excerpt taken from chapter II "General Effects of Scientific Technique" of "The Impact of Science on society".

Bertrand Russell pushed his visionary scenarios even further into details, in the chapter III "Scientific Technique in an Oligarchy" of the same book, stating as an example.

Bertrand Russell was the author of more than sixty books and over two thousand articles.

The Bertrand Russell Archives held by McMaster's William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections possess over 40,000 of his letters.