A tangent..

> Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy

That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.

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esoterae 3 days ago | parent [-]

Where do any of us stand but on the shoulders of giants?

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Der_Einzige 3 days ago | parent [-]

On the shoulders of god(s)?, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."

"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."

—Srinivasa Ramanujan

"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy

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kolektiv 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Way, way off-topic now, but if you ever get a chance to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disappearing_Number, don't miss it. It's rare to see a play weave mathematics and history into such a form, threading them through our modern world and showing the humanity of those who lived and breathed the equations on the page.

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cubefox 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's about the opposite of analytic philosophy though. Frege and Russell would have said it relies on reason, not intuition.

	▲	8bitsrule 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Reason works as a result of its limits. Reason fails as a result of its limits.

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mistrial9 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is this a critical thinking test? All sorts of public religious figures claim all sorts of miracles as an introductory biography item. I happen to believe in miracles! but this is not one of them. Symbolic logic, and certainly math, is not inherently written in one character set or another. Dreams mean things and things could carry effects somehow but a dream of math symbols with crimson curtains is not convincing from this view.