Frank Plumpton Ramsey Biography

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World of Scientific Discovery on Frank Plumpton Ramsey

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was born in Cambridge, England, in 1903. He was the older son of A. S. Ramsey, a mathematician who later became president of Magdalene College at Cambridge University. Ramsey's younger brother became Archbishop of Canterbury and his two sisters both graduated from universities.

In 1923, he earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge with first class honors. He then traveled briefly to Vienna, and upon his return in 1924 he was appointed a fellow at King's College, Cambridge. Although he never earned a Ph.D., Ramsey was soon promoted to lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge (1926) and was then made director of studies in mathematics at King's College. He held these posts until his untimely death.

Ramsey's contributions in the field of mathematics rest largely on two papers that he published in 1925 and 1928. The first of these dealt with the efforts of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell in Principia Mathematica to outline a comprehensive and logical foundation for all of mathematics. Ramsey reinterpreted some of the fundamental premises of the Whitehead-Russell work, and he was able do away with the axiom of reducibility, which Whitehead and Russell had been forced to use to deal with some basic contradictions arising out of their theory of types, which concludes that if classes belong to a particular type, and if they consist of homogenous members, then a class cannot be a member of itself. Contemporaries such as R. B. Braithwaite considered Ramsey's work in this area to be "almost the last word in the treatment of mathematics by this 'logical' school."

In 1928, Ramsey published a paper addressing what was then the most important question facing mathematical logicians, the so-called Entscheidungs problem. Entscheidungs The focus of this problem was to find a method for determining the consistency of a logical formula. In his paper, Ramsey was able to solve this problem for a certain specified set of conditions: when the axioms, or generally accepted theories, consist of general laws.

During his brief life, Ramsey also distinguished himself in the fields of economics and philosophy. Ramsey's documented contributions to economics were limited to only two published papers, but they were of extraordinary quality. His work was praised by the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes wrote that Ramsey possessed the ability to handle "the technical apparatus of our science with the easy grasp of one accustomed to something far more difficult." Ramsey's published work on philosophy was even slimmer than that in logic and economics, consisting of a single important paper on universals.

Ramsey was an intriguing and complex individual. His lectures were popular among undergraduates not only because of his brilliance and clarity of presentation but also because of his subtle humor and booming laugh. He died of a chronic liver disorder in 1930, at the age of 26. He left behind his wife, the former Lettice C. Baker, whom he had married in 1925, and two young daughters.