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Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS[66] (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

He was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians,[68] and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism".[b] Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see Logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy".

Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League.[71][72][73] He occasionally advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed and he decided he would "welcome with enthusiasm" world government.[74] He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I.[75] Later, Russell concluded that the war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany was a necessary "lesser of two evils" and also criticized Stalinist totalitarianism, condemned the United States' war on Vietnam and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.[76] In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963).

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire, United Kingdom,[a] on 18 May 1872, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy. His parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, were radical for their times. Lord Amberley consented to his wife's affair with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous.[83] Lord Amberley was a deist, and even asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russell's secular godfather.[84] Mill died the year after Russell's birth, but his writings had a great effect on Russell's life.

His paternal grandfather, Lord John Russell, later 1st Earl Russell (1792–1878), had twice been Prime Minister in the 1840s and 1860s.[85] A Member of Parliament since the early 1810s, he met with Napoleon Bonaparte in Elba.[86] The Russells had been prominent in England for several centuries before this, coming to power and the peerage with the rise of the Tudor dynasty (see: Duke of Bedford). They established themselves as one of the leading Whig families and participated in every great political event from the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536–1540 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688–1689 and the Great Reform Act in 1832.

Lady Amberley was the daughter of Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley.[76] Russell often feared the ridicule of his maternal grandmother,[88] one of the campaigners for education of women.

Russell won a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, and began his studies there in 1890,[101] taking as coach Robert Rumsey Webb. He became acquainted with the younger George Edward Moore and came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the Cambridge Apostles. He quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating as seventh Wrangler in the former in 1893 and becoming a Fellow in the latter in 1895.

Russell was 17 years old in the summer of 1889 when he met the family of Alys Pearsall Smith, an American Quaker five years older, who was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia. He became a friend of the Pearsall Smith family – they knew him primarily as "Lord John's grandson" and enjoyed showing him off.

He soon fell in love with the puritanical, high-minded Alys, and contrary to his grandmother's wishes, married her on 13 December 1894. Their marriage began to fall apart in 1901 when it occurred to Russell, while cycling, that he no longer loved her.[107] She asked him if he loved her and he replied that he did not. Russell also disliked Alys's mother, finding her controlling and cruel. A lengthy period of separation began in 1911 with Russell's affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell,[108] and he and Alys finally divorced in 1921 to enable Russell to remarry.

During his years of separation from Alys, Russell had passionate (and often simultaneous) affairs with a number of women, including Morrell and the actress Lady Constance Malleson.[110] Some have suggested that at this point he had an affair with Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the English governess and writer, and first wife of T. S. Eliot.

In June 1955, Russell had leased Plas Penrhyn in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merionethshire, Wales and on 5 July of the following year it became his and Edith's principal residence.

Russell published his three-volume autobiography in 1967, 1968, and 1969. He made a cameo appearance playing himself in the anti-war Hindi film Aman, by Mohan Kumar, which was released in India in 1967. This was Russell's only appearance in a feature film.

On 23 November 1969, he wrote to The Times newspaper saying that the preparation for show trials in Czechoslovakia was "highly alarming". The same month, he appealed to Secretary General U Thant of the United Nations to support an international war crimes commission to investigate alleged torture and genocide by the United States in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The following month, he protested to Alexei Kosygin over the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union of Writers.

On 31 January 1970, Russell issued a statement condemning "Israel's aggression in the Middle East", and in particular, Israeli bombing raids being carried out deep in Egyptian territory as part of the War of Attrition, which he compared to German bombing raids in the Battle of Britain and the US bombing of Vietnam. He called for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-Six-Day War borders. This was Russell's final political statement or act. It was read out at the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo on 3 February 1970, the day after his death.

Russell died of influenza, just after 8 pm on 2 February 1970 at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth.[190] His body was cremated in Colwyn Bay on 5 February 1970 with five people present. In accordance with his will, there was no religious ceremony but one minute's silence; his ashes were scattered over the Welsh mountains later that year. Although he was born in Monmouthshire, which was not legally re-included into Wales until 1972, and died in Penrhyndeudraeth in Wales, Russell identified as English. After his death, he left an estate valued at £69,423 (equivalent to £1.1 million in 2021). In 1980, a memorial to Russell was commissioned by a committee including the philosopher A. J. Ayer. It consists of a bust of Russell in Red Lion Square in London sculpted by Marcelle Quinton.

Lady Katharine Jane Tait, Russell's daughter, founded the Bertrand Russell Society in 1974 to preserve and understand his work. It publishes the Bertrand Russell Society Bulletin, holds meetings and awards prizes for scholarship, including the Bertrand Russell Society Award. She also authored several essays about her father; as well as a book, My Father, Bertrand Russell, which was published in 1975. All members receive Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies.

For the sesquicentennial of his birth, in May 2022, McMaster University's Bertrand Russell Archive, the university’s largest and most heavily used research collection, organized both a physical and virtual exhibition on Russell’s anti-nuclear stance in the post-war era, Scientists for Peace: the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the Pugwash Conference, which included the earliest version of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation held a commemoration at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, London, on 18 May, the anniversary of his birth. For its part, on the same day, La Estrella de Panamá published a biographical sketch by Francisco Díaz Montilla, who commented that "[if he] had to characterize Russell's work in one sentence [he] would say: criticism and rejection of dogmatism."

Bangladesh's first leader, Mujibur Rahman, named his youngest son Sheikh Russel in honour of Bertrand Russell.

courtesy-wikipedia

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