Bertrand Russell Dies: Philosopher-Activist Silenced at 97

Bertrand Russell was jailed twice, once for opposing World War I and once for protesting nuclear weapons, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in between. He published his first major philosophical work at twenty-eight and his last book at ninety-six. He was ninety-seven when he died on February 2, 1970, in Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales. Still writing. Still arguing. Born in Trellech, Monmouthshire on May 18, 1872, into one of Britain's great political families, Russell was raised by his grandparents after both parents died before he was four. His grandfather had been Prime Minister twice. Russell went to Cambridge, where he fell in love with mathematical logic and spent the next decade trying to prove that all of mathematics could be derived from pure logic. The result was Principia Mathematica, co-written with Alfred North Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, a three-volume monument of logical rigor that famously requires 362 pages to prove that 1+1=2. The work is one of the most important and least-read books in the history of Western philosophy. Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorems in 1931 showed that Russell's project could never fully succeed, but the logical tools developed in Principia transformed philosophy, mathematics, and computer science. Russell opposed World War I on pacifist grounds and was dismissed from his lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He served six months in Brixton Prison in 1918 for a pamphlet the government considered seditious. The prison time didn't slow him down; he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy while incarcerated. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought." His popular books on philosophy, science, and politics sold in the millions. A History of Western Philosophy, published in 1945, kept him financially solvent for decades. In his eighties and nineties, he led the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and was arrested again in 1961, at 89, for a sit-down protest in London. The magistrate offered to release him if he promised good behavior. He refused.