Textbook of AI

1861–1947, Mathematician, philosopher

Also known as: A. N. Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher who, with his former student Bertrand Russell, wrote the three volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910–1913). The work attempted to ground all of mathematics in symbolic logic and remains one of the most ambitious, and most difficult, books ever published. Its ramified theory of types provided the response to Russell's paradox; its formal apparatus inspired Hilbert's programme to prove the consistency of mathematics; and the theorems it laboriously derives became the test corpus of the first AI theorem prover, Newell, Shaw and Simon's Logic Theorist (1956), which produced novel proofs of 38 of the first 52 theorems in Chapter 2, one of which Russell judged "more elegant" than the original.

After completing Principia Whitehead's interests turned to the philosophy of science, the philosophy of education, and ultimately metaphysics. His 1929 Process and Reality founded process philosophy, an alternative to substance metaphysics that has had a quiet but persistent influence on philosophy of mind. He held chairs at Cambridge, Imperial College London and finally Harvard, where he taught philosophy until 1937.