Frank Plumpton Ramsey Biography

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World of Mathematics on Frank Plumpton Ramsey

Despite the shortness of his life, Frank Plumpton Ramsey had a strong influence on the world of mathematical logic. He launched a new specialty within his field now known as Ramsey theory, which deals with combinatorics. Ramsey was especially enamored of philosophy toward the end of his life and wrote several highly original works on that subject.

Ramsey was born in Cambridge, England on February 22, 1903. His father was president of the town's Magdelene College and his brother would one day become Archbishop of Canterbury. Ramsey received his secondary school education at Winchester College from 1915 to 1920, when he won an academic scholarship to Cambridge's Trinity College. There he concentrated on mathematics, becoming a senior scholar in 1921 and graduating with honors in 1923.

After a short trip to Vienna, Ramsey returned to Cambridge as a fellow at King's College in 1924. (This was testimony to his talent, since the school virtually never offered fellowships to people who had not studied there.) King's appointed him a lecturer in mathematics in 1926; he quickly earned a reputation as a brilliant and fascinating speaker. The school would soon name him director of mathematical studies.

Ramsey published his first major work in 1925. "The Foundations of Mathematics" contained his formal agreement that mathematics is a component of logic, as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead had declared in their Principia Mathematica. However, Ramsey suggested improvements in the work: namely that its authors eliminate the axiom of reducibility (Ramsey called it "certainly not self-evident") and that Russell's theory of types be simplified by treating certain semantic paradoxes as merely linguistic (e.g., the statement "I am lying.").

In 1926, Ramsey's paper "Mathematical Logic" appeared in the Mathematical Gazette. It featured an attack on Egbertus Jan Luitzen Brouwer's insistence that propositions are either true of false, and criticized David Hilbert for characterizing mathematics as "a meaningless game with marks on paper."

Ramsey presented perhaps his most influential paper, "On a problem of formal logic," to the London Mathematical Society in 1928. In it, he suggested methods for analyzing the consistency of a logical formula and introduced some combinatorics theorems that soon proved to be the seeds of a new branch of mathematics (Ramsey theory).

At about this time Ramsey also wrote two papers on economics: "A contribution to the theory of taxation" and "A mathematical theory of saving." Both appeared in the British Economic Journal. However, these were not deemed as important as his writings on philosophy--a subject on which Ramsey spent increasing amounts of time toward the end of his life. He wrote such papers as "Universals" (1925), "Facts and propositions" (1927), "Universals of law and fact" (1928), "Knowledge" (1929), "General propositions and causality" (1929), and "Theories" (1929). Some historians have suggested that Ramsey, had he lived longer, would have been one of the world's foremost philosophers.

Ramsey died at age 27 on January 19, 1930 in Cambridge after undergoing surgery for jaundice in London. He and his wife had married in 1925 and had two daughters. At six feet three inches, Ramsey was a physically imposing man, although he was known for his quiet, modest, and easygoing nature. He was a staunch atheist, enjoyed hiking, loved classical music, had a strong sense of humor, and limited his work hours to four each morning.