British-Welsh writer, mathematician, logician, philosopher, social critic, one of the founders of analytic philosophy and considered one of the twentieth century’s most important liberal thinkers. With Alfred Whitehead, he wrote “The Principia Mathematica,” 1910-1913, a treatise on mathematical logic. He produced more than 3,000 publications and won the Nobel Prize as well as Britain’s most prestigious honor, the Order of Merit. Russell was the author of more than 40 books on philosophy, education, politics and sex, outspoken and controversial for his day.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born the third Earl Russell, grandson of the Prime Minister of England, Lord John Russell. Russell’s father’s family traced their lineage back to the Norman Conquest. His sister and both parents, however, were dead by the time he was four: both his mother and sister died in 1874, and his father in 1876. His grandfather, Lord Russell, and grandmother overturned his father’s will to win custody of Russell and his brother, Frank. His grandfather died in 1878, and his grandmother, a sternly religious woman, supervised his upbringing. It was, by his own autobiography, an unhappy childhood.
In 1890, he entered Trinity College in Cambridge where he was a brilliant student of mathematics and philosophy and was awarded a first class B. A. in Mathematics in 1893. In 1900, he met the Italian mathematician Peano at the International Congress in Paris, and Peano became the inspiration for “The Principles of Mathematics,” which Russell wrote in 1903. The work later expanded into three volumes in collaboration with Alfred Whitehead, written and published from 1910 to 1913. The work established Russell as one of the founding fathers of modern analytical philosophy , with his defense of logicism (the view that mathematics is reducible to logic in some sense).
Russell’s external career was marked with controversy. In 1908, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, then in 1916, he was dismissed from Trinity College in connection with anti-war protests. Anti-war protests also landed him in prison for six months in 1918, and during that time he wrote his “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy,” 1919. In 1920, he traveled to Russia and then taught philosophy at Peking for a year. He went to the United States in 1938, and taught there for several years at various universities.
Despite all this, he continued to make major contributions to not only philosophy but to education, ethics, politics, history, religion and popular science. In 1940, he was appointed to a position at City College New York, but it was revoked following public protests. In 1943, he was dismissed from the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
He became the third Earl Russell in 1931 upon the death of his brother. In 1958, he became founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and in 1961 was imprisoned for a week in connection with anti-nuclear protests.
The first two volumes of his autobiography were published in 1967 and 1968.
His relationships appeared to be as spirited as his academic life. He married Alys Pearsall Smith in 1894 and from most reports, treated her badly. She was five years his senior. He divorced her in 1921 to marry Dora Black, a left-wing feminist who had become pregnant with a son he wanted to legitimize. They divorced in 1935. In 1936, he married Patricia Peter Helen Spence: they were divorced in 1952, when he made his fourth marriage, to Edith Finch.
He died peacefully at Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales on 2 February 1970.
Link to Wikipedia biography