Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Bertrand Russell was the British philosopher, mathematician, and public intellectual who, across a career spanning seven decades, argued for rationalism, pacifism, and the examined life with a consistency that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. Born in 1872, he co-wrote Principia Mathematica with A.N. Whitehead, attempting to derive all of mathematics from logical principles — one of the most ambitious intellectual projects of the century. He was imprisoned during the First World War for anti-war activism, dismissed from Trinity College, Cambridge, and denied a position at the City College of New York on grounds of immorality. He outlived most of his critics and died in 1970 at ninety-seven. The good life, he wrote, is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge — a formula he tested against every orthodoxy he encountered.