Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born into the British aristocracy in 1872. His parents died within two years of each other — his mother of diphtheria when he was two, his father of bronchitis when he was three. He and his brother were sent to live with their grandmother, the Countess Russell, a formidable woman of strong principles who raised him in a household of high intellectual seriousness and strict morality. He was educated at home until Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and philosophy and published his first major work — on the foundations of mathematics — before he was thirty.

He lost his Cambridge fellowship in 1916 when he was convicted of making statements likely to prejudice the recruiting of soldiers. He was imprisoned for six months in 1918 for a similar offense. He was dismissed from appointments in the United States in the 1940s — once by the College of the City of New York on grounds that his views on marriage and morality were incompatible with his fitness to teach — and was a lifelong target of censure from institutions that found his opinions on sex, religion, and pacifism intolerable.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, was readmitted to Cambridge fellowship in 1944, co-founded the Pugwash Conferences on nuclear disarmament in 1957, was imprisoned again at age eighty-nine for his anti-nuclear protest activities, and died in 1970 at ninety-seven, having published more than seventy books.