Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead, who lived from 15 February 1861 to 30 December 1947, was an English mathematician and philosopher. He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1880, where his academic advisor was Edward Routh, graduated as fourth wrangler in 1884 and was elected a fellow, teaching mathematics and physics there until 1910. In his early career he wrote mainly on mathematics, logic and physics. He published A Treatise on Universal Algebra in 1898, wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica from 1910 to 1913 with his former student Bertrand Russell, a work counted among the twentieth century's most important in mathematical logic, and wrote An Introduction to Mathematics in 1911. He later held posts at University College London and the University of London, and from the late 1910s turned from mathematics to the philosophy of science and then to metaphysics, founding process philosophy. Willard Van Orman Quine did his Harvard doctorate under him.