Bertrand Russell’s work on mathematical logic had great influence on symbolic logic and on set theory in mathematics. His major work in this field is Principia Mathematica (1910–13), written with Alfred N. Whitehead. The Principia Mathematica created a powerful stimulus for the growth of mathematical logic because it attempted to express all of mathematics in formal logical terms; and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (1931), which, by showing that no such enterprise could ever succeed, has led to investigation of the boundary between what is possible in mathematics and what is not. Russell and Whitehead’s Principia helped to establish research into symbolic logic as a major new branch of mathematics.

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Bio

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During the First World War, Russell became widely known as a conscientious objector; he also campaigned for women’s suffrage and later took a leading role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950.