Frank Ramsey - The Brightest Star
Written by Cheryl Misak
On 25 April, 2024, King’s celebrated one of its finest—the great philosopher, economist, and mathematician, Frank Plumpton Ramsey. He was a true rock star, putting together a smashing and enduring catalogue of hits before he died at the age of 26, in January 1930. He is perhaps most widely known for his trailblazing work on choice under conditions of uncertainty, which provided the first model of subjective expected utility and now underpins much of economics, and the social sciences. In economics proper, Ramsey published two papers in Keynes’ journal (the Economic Journal), one on optimum taxation and one on optimal savings. Each has become a classic, launching two branches of economics and informing a handful of Nobel prize-winning ideas. Ramsey identified very modern problems and solutions to them, setting agendas that are still being pursued a century later. He has a branch of pure mathematics named after him: Ramsey Theory.
In philosophy, Ramsey made striking advances in philosophy of science, truth theory, and philosophy of language. Donald Davidson, a leading philosopher of the twentieth century, coined the term ‘the Ramsey Effect’: the phenomenon of finding out that your exciting and apparently original philosophical discovery has been already presented, and presented more elegantly, by Frank Ramsey. When he was an undergraduate, Ramsey translated Wittgenstein’s difficult Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—the only philosopher to ever understand the book, in Wittgenstein’s opinion. He became a significant influence on Wittgenstein, causing him to abandon the project in the Tractatus and become what we know of as the later Wittgenstein, focussed on meaning as use and our practices.
The April event kicked off with a wonderful exhibition of Ramsey and his intellectual environs, curated by Patricia McGuire, the King’s archivist. It included the Apostle’s Minute Book, material from the Keynes collection, and, most strikingly, original letters and photographs recently gifted by the Ramsey family to King’s.
The guests of honor were Ramsey’s grandson, Stephen Burch, and his wife Susan Holroyd, the drivers of that gift. So many illustrious academics attended that one cannot pick out some without neglecting and offending so many others. The packed-out lecture (which I was pleased to give) was introduced by Philosophy Fellow Anna Alexandrova and had soundbites from Ramsey’s widow Lettice, Frances Partridge, and other voices from the past. Here is Richard Braithwaite telling us how Keynes pipped Trinity (Ramsey’s undergraduate college) to the post by making him a mathematics fellow straight out of his undergraduate degree. (Courtesy of the Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto):
There was a buzzing reception before the talk and the evening was capped off with a lovely dinner. A fitting tribute to one of the finest scholars and human beings to have traipsed across the King’s grounds.
Indeed, a pleasing coincidence was to be seen on those grounds—banners celebrating Alan Turing. Turing came up to King’s as a mathematics undergraduate in 1931. Had Ramsey not died the previous year, he would have been his supervisor. Turing attended Max Newman’s Foundations of Mathematics lectures, which also would have been Ramsey’s and the two of them went on to be the primary code-breakers at Bletchley Park.
Turing was interested in precisely Ramsey’s set of problems in mathematics, especially the Entscheidungsproblem or the decision problem: can we find a procedure or an algorithm to decide whether any well-formed statement in a system is a theorem or not? Ramsey had published, the year before his death, a paper that came tantalisingly close to answering the question. Turing was appointed to a Fellowship at King’s in 1935, at the age of 22, just a little older than Ramsey had been when he got his King’s job. Turing taught The Foundations of Mathematics—the course that Ramsey had so happily bagged as a new fellow. In 1936, Turing came up with an idea of a machine that solved the Entscheidungsproblem. He showed that, by computing numbers, you could prove that there were unsolvable problems. His paper was titled ‘On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’. The seeds were planted for the birth of computer. What, we might well ask, would have transpired if these two great King’s fellows had sat in the rooms in which recently celebrated Ramsey and put their heads together?
An undoubtedly brilliant mind, Ramsay was also witty, passionate, socialist, feminist, and committed to centering humanity in academic and philosophical endeavours, something which King’s and the E-Lab continue to champion. We can learn much not only from his scholarship but also from his approach to life more broadly:
“I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.”
Cheryl Misak
Cheryl Misak is Professor of Philosophy and a former Provost of the University of Toronto. She is an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and has held visiting fellowships at All Souls College, the Goethe University in Frankfurt, the Free University in Berlin, and Trinity College and St John’s College, Cambridge. She is currently working on a book on Oxford linguistic philosophy.