Principia Mathematica Celebrates 100 Years

January 3, 2011

Science writer Julie Rehmeyer talked to National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel about the 100 year anniversary of Bertrand Russel and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica.

“They were really trying to rescue math from a deep crisis of foundations,” said Rehmeyer. “Mathematicians had found some surprising results that led them to realize they needed to be a whole lot more careful than they had been previously. So, Russell and Whitehead set out to show that math really boiled down to logic and to define at the very most basic level what mathematics was, and to show then that all of math was logical consequences from some very, very simple principles.”

Listen to the interview here.

Rehmeyer writes about math for Wired and ScienceNews.org.

Id:

1020

Start Date:

Monday, January 3, 2011