WHITEHEAD, Alfred North, & Bertrand Russell.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Principia Mathematica. First edition of the first volume of "one of the most impressive intellectual monuments of the twentieth century" (ODNB), an outstanding association copy from the library of Godfrey Harold Hardy, Russell's disciple, colleague, and one of the volume's first reviewers.Hardy (1877-1947) "had a profound influence on modern mathematics and ranks as one of the greatest English mathematicians of the twentieth century" (ODNB). Hardy and Russell were both on the staff of Trinity College, Cambridge: Hardy as lecturer in mathematics from 1906, Russell as lecturer in philosophy from 1910. Whitehead also taught at Trinity until 1910, and all three were members of the Cambridge Apostles. "In his political views and in his interest in mathematical philosophy, Hardy was a disciple of Bertrand Russell. Before 1914 Russell, Hardy, and [John Edensor] Littlewood spent several summer holidays together, discussing mathematics, physics, philosophy, and politics" (ODNB).Hardy was among the first reviewers of Volume I of Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead's hugely ambitious attempt to construct "the whole body of mathematical doctrine by logical deduction from the basis of a small number of primitive ideas and a small number of primitive principles of logical inference" (DSB).Hardy's review, "The New Symbolic Logic", was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 7 September 1911. It opened: "Perhaps twenty or thirty people in England may be expected to read this b

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