He was born on 18 May 1872,
in Trellech, Monmouthshire, Wales. Russell got a scholarship in 1890 to
study the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College. As a result, he got
to know Alfred North Whitehead and joined Cambridge Apostles on his
recommendation.
Many well-known philosophers were members of The Apostles. Russell
became interested in philosophy after listening to their discussions. He
graduated with First Class in mathematics as the seventh Wrangler in
1893.
Later in 1894, Russell completed the Moral Sciences Tripos and joined
the British embassy in Paris as an attaché. He also started writing a
thesis, ‘An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry,’ which earned him a
fellowship in 1895.
He wrote his first book, The Principles of Mathematics, in 1903 and
developed and extended the mathematical logic of Peano and Frege with
his friend Alfred Whitehead.
He studied social democracy for a few more months in Berlin. He wrote
two series of books during this time, one on science and philosophy and
the other on social and political thinking. Later, he studied
philosophy in England.
He became a lecturer at Trinity College in 1910. He became active in
the No-Conscription fellowship after the First World War broke out and
was fined £100 for writing a leaflet criticizing a sentence of two years
for a conscientious objector. He lost his lectureship in 1916.
He was sentenced to six months imprisonment in 1918 for writing a
pacifist article. In prison, he wrote an Introduction to Mathematical
Philosophy (1919). He wrote Analysis of Mind (1921) after giving some
lectures in London.
In 1920, Russell spent a short time in Russia studying Bolshevism’s
conditions. Later that year, he went to China to teach philosophy at
Peking University.
He and his wife started a school for young kids in 1927.
In 1938, he went to the US and taught at many of the country’s best universities.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 for his varied and significant writings about humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”.
In 1934, he won the Sylvester medal from the Royal Society, and in 1950, the de Morgan medal from the London Mathematical Society.
Bertrand Russell died on 02 February 1970
