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Alfread Whitehead is born
Alfred North Whitehead was born on February 15th, 1861 at Ramsgate in Kent, England, to Alfred and Maria Whitehead. -
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Alfred Whitehead's life, in short
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Cambridge
Alfred Whitehead worked on numerous publications dealing primarily in mathematics. While at Cambridge he co-authored several publications on mathematics alongside Bertrand Russell. Also during this time Alfred taught at Trinity College where he was lauded for his impeccable aptitude for teaching Mathematics to students. Futhermore, here became a Fellow of the Royal Society -
Treatise on Universal Algebra
This was Alfred's first publication of many. He co-authored this with one of his previous, Bertrand Russell. A Treatise on Universal Algebra is one of two volumes, however, the second volume was never published. The first volumes discusses the principles of algebra delves into the logic of Grassmann's calculus. -
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Principia Mathematica
The second volume of Whitehead’s Treatise was never published as an additional volume. Instead, him and Russell wrote three additional publications known as “Principia Mathematica”. They published this after meeting Giuseppe Peano t the First International Congress of Philosophy in 1990. Whitehead and Russell took a strong liking to Peano’s logical philosophy behind algebra. Because of this, they together fathered the restructuring of mathematics from logic, one of their greatest successes. -
Space and Relativity
Even though the Volumes of Principia Mathematica were not yet complete, Whitehead's mind could not help but wander into a new realm. Whitehead, read Albert Einstein's published work on the Realm of Relativity and this sparked Whitehead's interest. He began his own research and published two more novels on the subject; "Principles of Natural Knowledge" and "The Concept of Nature". -
Whitehead, Physics, and Geometry
Over a short period after he delved into Einstein's work on relativity he began to question how philosophers thought about physics. Alfred, began to argue that physics and geometry should not be thought of as one in the same but as two separate pillars. Sadly, with the wording of his theory many poor interpretations were birthed from this. The term "bimetrics" was born from this and created two pieces to what we know physics as today. -
Alfred Dies
Alfred died on December 30th 1947 and in his will to his wife, he left explicit instructions to burn all of his unpublished work. -
Sources
Desmet, Ronald, and Andrew David Irvine. “Alfred North Whitehead.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 4 Sept. 2018, plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/whitehed/. Whitehead, Alfred North. A Treatise on Universal Algebra With Applications. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
