Curated playlist
Philosophers of mathematics
- Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein once spent his days examining patents for gravel sorters.
- Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges directed Argentina's National Library while completely blind.
- René DescartesRené Descartes had three dreams in a heated room in 1619. He believed they revealed a new philosophy to him.
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap argued that most deep philosophical questions were meaningless.
- Edmund HusserlA Franciscan priest smuggled approximately 40,000 pages of Edmund Husserl's notes out of Nazi Germany.
- Thomas HobbesThomas Hobbes, the English philosopher born in 1588 at Westport in Wiltshire, liked to say that his mother gave birth to twins: "myself and fear." He arrived early, because news had just reached the household that the Spanish Armada was…
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré won a royal prize for a problem he did not solve. His entry still revealed the first chaotic system.
- Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig Wittgenstein, the Austro-British philosopher, published only one book of philosophy during his lifetime, and it ran to just 75 pages. He was born in Vienna on the 26th of April 1889 and died on the 29th of April 1951. Nearly…
- Bertrand RussellAt 89, philosopher Bertrand Russell went to jail for an anti-nuclear protest. Asked to behave, he said, "No, I won't."
- Karl PopperSir Karl Raimund Popper was born in Vienna on the 28th of July 1902 and died on the 17th of September 1994. In between, he built a philosophy of science on an odd idea. The strongest theories, he argued, are the ones most exposed to being…