Textbook of AI

1872–1970, Philosopher, mathematician, logician

Also known as: Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, mathematician and public intellectual whose contributions to the foundations of mathematics shaped the symbolic turn in twentieth-century logic and, through it, the symbolic turn in early AI. With Alfred North Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), a three-volume attempt to derive all of mathematics from a small set of logical axioms. To avoid the paradox that bears his name, the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, they introduced the theory of types, the ancestor of every typed programming language and of modern dependent type theory.

Russell's 1905 paper On Denoting in Mind gave a logical analysis of definite descriptions ("the present King of France") that became a paradigm of analytic philosophy. His 1903 Principles of Mathematics and the broader Principia established the framework in which Hilbert posed the Entscheidungsproblem and in which Gödel proved his incompleteness theorems.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, was imprisoned twice (once during the First World War for pacifist activism, again in 1961 over nuclear-disarmament protest), and remained politically active into his nineties. His relevance to AI is partly direct, the Principia is the proof system that the Logic Theorist of Newell, Shaw and Simon (1956) was set to verify, the first running program ever to prove non-trivial mathematical theorems, and partly through the type-theoretic lineage that runs from Russell through Church to modern functional programming.