Russell, Bertrand Arthur William, 3rd Earl

Russell, Bertrand Arthur William, 3rd Earl (b. 18 May 1872, d. 2 Feb. 1970). British mathematician, philosopher, and peace campaigner Born at Trelleck (Wales), he was educated at home by private tutors, and at Cambridge, where he became a lecturer in 1895. In the next two decades, among a host of publications on politics, philosophy, and mathematics, perhaps his most important was the Principia Mathematica (3 vols., 1910–13). He was also active in radical politics, and in 1907 stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal Party candidate supporting women's suffrage. When World War I broke out in 1914, he was involved in campaigns against the war, and was imprisoned for six months in 1918. This lost him his fellowship at Cambridge, but whilst in prison, he began writing The Analysis of Mind (1921). He stood for Parliament again in 1922–3, this time for the Labour Party. Meanwhile, he continued to write on subjects including education, marriage, morality, and government. An erstwhile supporter of appeasement, he came to support World War II, seeing Nazism as a great danger to the values he held dear. He returned to teach at Cambridge when his fellowship was restored in 1945. He became widely known through his ability to communicate complicated ideas, which he did, for example, through his A History of Western Philosophy (1945), and his 1948–9 BBC Reith lectures on ‘Authority and the Individual’. The hydrogen bomb tests in 1954 (nuclear bomb) led him to found the CND movement and also Pugwash. He was imprisoned again in 1961 (for one week) for demonstrating outside Parliament against nuclear weapons, and in his final years, through the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, rallied academic opposition to US policy in Vietnam.