Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher, born in Ramsgate, Kent, on 15 February 1861. In his early career he wrote mainly on mathematics, logic and physics, and with his former student Bertrand Russell he wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica, published from 1910 to 1913, which is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic. He accepted a position as professor of applied mathematics at Imperial College London, and in 1924 he was invited to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy. From the late 1910s he turned his attention from mathematics to the philosophy of science and then to metaphysics, creating the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which argues that reality consists of processes rather than material objects.