Delicious Facts

Russell

• Grandfather was British prime minister
• Told Virginia Woolf his devotion to serious intellectual work came to an end when “my passions got hold of me”
• Met Lenin on a visit to Russia. This visit turned him against the Russian Revolution

Wittgenstein

• His Austrian family was one of the richest in the world
• Was at same (obscure) school at same time as Hitler
• His family paid off the Nazis using their fortune to be classified as “mixed” rather than “full Jews” (and avoided the Holocaust)
• Three of his four brothers died by separate acts of suicide
• Tried to move to the Soviet Union to work as a laborer

Haldane

• Aristocratic family, father was a prominent biologist
• Introduced the primordial soup theory of the origin of life
• For a period, he was a Stalinist and defended Lysenkoism on BBC radio
• Moved to India late in life and renounced British citizenship

Needham

• As a professor of biochemistry, at age 37 he began an improbable pivot into Sinology when he fell in love with his Chinese grad student and started learning Chinese
• In China he befriended Zhou Enlai and met Mao
• He was part of a commission investigating whether the US had used biological weapons in the Korean War and was fooled into believing the US had

Turing

• Would occasionally run 40 miles from Bletchley to London for meetings and tried out for British Olympic team
• Apparently he took fortune-telling seriously

Biographies

• Russell: Autobiography; Monk
• Keynes: Skidelsky,
• Wittgenstein: Monk
• Haldane: Subramanian
• Needham: Winchester
• Turing: Hodges

Also see:

• Biopic film on Turing from the BBC
• Wittgenstein movie, which includes Russell and Keynes as characters:
• Logicomix: graphic novel feature Russell, Turing, and Wittgenstein (coauthored by computer scientist)

Why I found these figures interesting

• They made exceptional and creative intellectual contributions (helping to found new fields). Turing’s contributions seem most important.
• They had dramatic, full-bodied involvement in wars
• They spent significant periods working outside academia
• For their time, they had highly unconventional romantic lives and were eccentric in other ways
• Russell and Haldane were self-described rationalists

Interactions

Russell acted as Wittgenstein’s PhD supervisor but felt Wittgenstein surpassed him already as a student. Keynes invited Wittgenstein to join the Apostles and helped him get British citizenship during WW2. Turing attended Wittgenstein’s lectures on the philosophy of mathematics. Needham succeeded Haldane as Reader in biochemistry at Cambridge.

Russell on Keynes:

Keynes's intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.

Keynes on Russell and Wittgenstein:

The first impression conveyed by the work of Russell was that the field of formal logic was enormously extended. The gradual perfection of the formal treatment at the hands of himself, of Wittgenstein and of Ramsey had been, however, gradually to empty it of content and to reduce it more and more to mere dry bones, until finally it seemed to exclude not only all experience, but most of the principles, usually reckoned logical, of reasonable thought. Wittgenstein’s solution was to regard everything else as a sort of inspired nonsense, having great value indeed for the individual, but incapable of being exactly discussed.

Wittgenstein on Russell:

Russell's books should be bound in two colours…those dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them.

Russell wrote a long essay (“Icarus or The Future of Science”) responding to Haldane’s seminal book “Daedalus”.

Haldane was the reviewer for Turing’s famous paper on morphogenesis. The review is prickly:

Before the paper is accepted, I consider that the whole mathematical part should be re-written. In the first place, some passages assuming ignorance in readers might be omitted without much loss. Secondly, much of the biology, e.g. pp 56-58, can be found in elementary textbooks, and often stated more accurately

…

1. Does it contain contributions to knowledge of sufficient scientific interest for the space required? Yes

2. Are any portions of the paper, or any illustrations, redundant? Yes

3. Should the paper be published by the Society? Yes, subject to drastic emendations.

…

7. Comments or criticisms which might enable the author to improve or correct his

statement.

I regret that my report, in the absence of figures or tables, must be insecurely grounded. I should be glad to discuss the paper with the author, but may be leaving for India shortly. I regard the central idea as being sufficiently important to warrant publication. I am equally clear that the paper should not be published as it stands.