Whitehead, Alfred North 1861-1947
English mathematician and Idealist philosopher

Born in London, he was educated at Sherborne and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was senior lecturer in mathematics until 1911. He became Professor of Applied Mathematics at Imperial College, London (1914-24), and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard (1924-37). Extending the Booleian symbolic logic in a highly original Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898), he contributed a remarkable memoir to the Royal Society, Mathematical Concepts of the Material World (1905). Profoundly influenced by Giuseppe Peano, he collaborated with his former pupil at Trinity, Bertrand Russell, in the Principia Mathematica (1910-13), the greatest single contribution to logic since Aristotle. In his Edinburgh Gifford Lectures, 'Process and Reality' (1929), he attempted a metaphysics comprising psychological as well as physical experience, with events as the ultimate components of reality. Other more popular works include Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938). He was awarded the first James Scott Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1922).

Bibliography: Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead, The Man and His Works (1985)