Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947)

English philosopher and mathematician. In his ‘theory of organism’, he attempted a synthesis of metaphysics and science. His works include Principia Mathematica (1910–13) (with Bertrand Russell), The Concept of Nature (1920), and Adventures of Ideas (1933).

Whitehead's research in mathematics involved a highly original attempt – incorporating the principles of logic – to create an extension of ordinary algebra to universal algebra (A Treatise of Universal Algebra (1898)), and a meticulous re-examination of the relativity theory of Albert Einstein.

Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, and studied at Cambridge. He was professor of applied mathematics at London University 1914–24 and professor of philosophy at Harvard University, USA, 1924–37.

At the International Congress of Philosophy in 1900, Whitehead and Russell heard Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano describe the method by which he had arrived at his axioms concerning the natural numbers, and they spent the next ten years on their project to deduce mathematics from logic in a general and fundamental way.

Other works include Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), Science and the Modern World (1925), and Process and Reality (1929).