The life and work of Frank Ramsey
May 1, 2020 7:47 AM   Subscribe

The Man Who Thought Too Fast: "Frank Ramsey—a philosopher, economist, and mathematician—was one of the greatest minds of the last century. Have we caught up with him yet?" Anthony Gottlieb writes for the New Yorker about Frank Ramsey, the philosophical phenom who died at age 26, and the new and first full biography of him, “Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers” by Cheryl Misak.
“The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Strachey, a member of London’s Bloomsbury literary set, wrote to a friend on January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued. “The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.”

Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst: Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton’s old college, Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the age of eighteen to produce the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the most talked-about philosophy book of the time; two years later, he published a critique of it in the leading philosophy journal in English, Mind. G. E. Moore, the journal’s editor, who had been lecturing at Cambridge for a decade before Ramsey turned up, confessed that he was “distinctly nervous” when this first-year student was in the audience, because he was “very much cleverer than I was.” John Maynard Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the undergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and intellectual prowess.

When Ramsey later published a paper about rates of saving, Keynes called it “one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made.” Its most controversial idea was that the well-being of future generations should be given the same weight as that of the present one. Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.” In the wake of the Great Depression, economists had more pressing concerns; only decades later did the paper’s enormous impact arrive. And so it went with most of Ramsey’s work. His contribution to pure mathematics was tucked away inside a paper on something else. It consisted of two theorems that he used to investigate the procedures for determining the validity of logical formulas. More than forty years after they were published, these two tools became the basis of a branch of mathematics known as Ramsey theory, which analyzes order and disorder. (As an Oxford mathematician, Martin Gould, has explained, Ramsey theory tells us, for instance, that among any six users of Facebook there will always be either a trio of mutual friends or a trio in which none are friends.)

Ramsey not only died young but lived too early, or so it can seem. He did little to advertise the importance of his ideas, and his modesty did not help. He was not particularly impressed with himself—he thought he was rather lazy. At the same time, the speed with which his mind worked sometimes left a blur on the page. The prominent American philosopher Donald Davidson was one of several thinkers to experience what he dubbed “the Ramsey effect.” You’d make a thrilling breakthrough only to find that Ramsey had got there first.

There was also the problem of Wittgenstein, whose looming example and cultlike following distracted attention from Ramsey’s ideas for decades. But Ramsey rose again. Economists now study Ramsey pricing; mathematicians ponder Ramsey numbers. Philosophers talk about Ramsey sentences, Ramseyfication, and the Ramsey test. Not a few scholars believe that there are Ramseyan seams still to mine.
posted by homunculus (18 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
Lytton Strachey is a grain of salt on a bagel but he was right about Ramsey.

nice read.
posted by clavdivs at 8:14 AM on May 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.”

which is all the argument for running a deficit that I've ever needed.
posted by philip-random at 8:22 AM on May 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


which I realize may be a little counter intuitive but what I like about it is how it forces one (if one is being remotely thoughtful) to consider the reality of the future -- that it is a direct result of what we do now (to be profoundly obvious).

So, future, here we are including you in our plans, confident that you'll be up to them.
posted by philip-random at 8:26 AM on May 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


I set aside (X) o be used only in the future (Y), and now I have a basement full of Xes.

Never mind. I have to go shave my barber. BRB

posted by mule98J at 8:57 AM on May 1, 2020


I feel like I should have something to say in this thread.
posted by wittgenstein at 9:12 AM on May 1, 2020 [17 favorites]


Genuine curiosity: have there been any notable analyses of the "discounting the interests of future people" argument as it relates to arguments about abortion?
posted by PhineasGage at 9:29 AM on May 1, 2020


I know nothing about this topic, but.... one could construe abortion and "interests of future people" as separable issues, or at least issues that concern different entities. Abortion is about determining the elements of the set of future people -- who will exist in the future, and who won't -- while "interests of future people" is about the properties of the elements of the set of future people -- which of the future people will have an xbox, and which will not.
posted by serif at 9:38 AM on May 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


I feel like I should have something to say in this thread

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
posted by thelonius at 10:28 AM on May 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


Lytton Strachey is a grain of salt on a bagel

But he was also the uncle of Christopher Strachey, whose wide-ranging work in foundational computer science contributed to better understanding the mathematical meaning of "=", which would have delighted Ramsey.

An altogether fascinating article!
posted by sjswitzer at 10:28 AM on May 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


His widow, Lettice Ramsey, was a noted photographer, especially for her portraits of the "Cambridge Communists' and the Bloomsbury group.
posted by readery at 10:46 AM on May 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


.
posted by lalochezia at 10:51 AM on May 1, 2020


To have done so much and left such a mark by the time he was 26 gives a whole new perspective on the over used term prodigy.

There was a Radio 3 Arts & Ideas programme about Ramsey with Cheryl Misak a couple of months ago, when the book first came out, discussing Ramsey and the new biography, which people might find interesting.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 12:35 PM on May 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


I recall that I read a nice summary of Ramsey's critique of the Tractatus here, but it's paywalled. I think the main point was that Wittgenstein's thesis that the only possible kind of necessity in judgement depends only on logical contradictions could not account for certain kinds of judgements, such that a thing can not be colored red and blue all over. That depends, he said, on facts about the world, not on language, which is exactly what Wittgenstein said we must do without. I'm not sure if I have that quite right, but I think (as Wittgenstein came to think) there are numerous other huge problems with the Tractatus, if that won't do. I found Ramsey's review (pdf) from Mind, if you want to get into the weeds.
posted by thelonius at 3:04 PM on May 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


I shit you not! I literally just saw this pop up on my youtube the other day, and only just now while seeing the photos and discussion of Michael Ramsey realized I had watched that.

WOW! The Algos gettin' SPOOOKY!
posted by symbioid at 3:38 PM on May 1, 2020


Sorry link for above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBRvSdXqIIs
posted by symbioid at 3:38 PM on May 1, 2020


That depends, he said, on facts about the world, not on language,

In Tractarian jargon, I suppose, I mean that this judgement depends on things, not on facts.
posted by thelonius at 4:58 PM on May 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


Saw this on 3quarksdaily last night, so think it's just making the rounds...
posted by blue shadows at 6:11 PM on May 1, 2020


Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is “ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.”

fwiw, here is a philosophical treatise (book) expanding on this concept (and a review/critique ;)
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM on May 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


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