The source
The exact words
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”
“The Study of Mathematics”. First published in The New Quarterly, November 1907; reprinted in Philosophical Essays (1910) and in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918).
The story
Why Russell said it
In 1907 Russell was buried in the work that became Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead to derive all of mathematics from logic. It would take them ten years and nearly 2,000 pages; famously, the proof that 1 + 1 = 2 does not arrive until well into the first volume.
“The Study of Mathematics” is his defense of why anyone should care. Russell argued that schools taught mathematics as a set of rules to memorize, and so hid the thing that made it worth learning. Mathematics, he wrote, is a refuge from the world of accidents, a place where reason reaches certainty and where the reward is a kind of beauty no painting can give.
The comparison to sculpture is exact: cold, austere, without color, yet perfect in form. Russell was not being sentimental. He spent his life trying to make that perfection rigorous, and he lived to see it cracked, first by his own paradox and then by Gödel.
His story with logic is told as a graphic novel in Logicomix, below. For a short book by Russell himself, read his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, written in prison in 1918.
Philosopher & logician
Who was Bertrand Russell?
- Born
- 18 May 1872, Trellech, Wales
- Died
- 2 February 1970, Penrhyndeudraeth
- Known for
- Russell's paradox, Principia Mathematica
- Said it
- “The Study of Mathematics”, 1907
Bertrand Russell was born into a famous political family in Wales and studied mathematics and philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1901 he discovered Russell's paradox, the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, which shook the foundations Gottlob Frege had just built.
Beyond logic he wrote on almost everything, from A History of Western Philosophy to marriage and nuclear weapons. He was jailed twice for his pacifism, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, and was still campaigning against nuclear war in his nineties.
