Word: algebraical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Twin Sisters. The first of Whitehead's 22 books (A Treatise on Universal Algebra) was published in 1898; his final volume (Essays in Science and Philosophy) appeared last year (TIME, May 12). After a nine-year collaboration with his famous pupil, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead wrote the monumental Principia Mathematica (1910). This book approached mathematics not as a science of magnitude but as a science of deduction; it undertook to replace two existing sciences-logic and mathematics-by one new science, mathematical logic. Because Whitehead felt that "conventional English is the twin sister to barren thought" and that words...
Professor Whitehead was perhaps best known for two early works, written before his arrival in Cambridge--"A Treatise on Universal Algebra," (1898), and "Principia Mathematics," (1910), in which he collaborated with is friend and former pupil Bertrand Russell. In the latter, a monumental three-volume opus, the authors cut one of the major tasks of philosophy in half by demonstrating that there is a definite connection between pure mathematics and logic...
Whitehead hated and feared the "bifurcation of nature" by which many philosophers separated their thought from the physical world; and his realization of their basic fallacy is all the more remarkable in a man who was embued with the training of mathematics and physical science. His early works in algebra and his great "Principia Mathematica," both of which brought combination and simplification to logic and mathematics, were the beginnings of his campaign, which reached fruition in 1929 with the publication of "Process and Reality," where he set forth a dynamic philosophy of the world which boldly embraced physical science...
...waste of time for most high-school students to read Il Penseroso, Ivanhoe, Silas Marner and other compulsory classics. It would be enough for many to secure "sufficient competence in reading to comprehend newspapers and magazines reasonably well." Only a gifted few can achieve any real understanding of algebra or geometry. It should, therefore, be a matter of choice whether a student takes algebra, literature, Latin, foreign languages...
...Algebra at Five. Today, in a faded yellow-brick-and-plaster house in Adyar, Maria Montessori is hard at work. She lectures in Italian two or three times a week; Mario translates into English for her. She is surer than ever of one thing: "The child is capable of achieving culture at an age hitherto unsuspected." She now teaches arithmetic at 3½, algebra at five, and finds that eight-year-olds learn algebra quicker than 14-year-olds, for they consider it a game, instead of something to dread. An 18-month-old child, she says, is "perhaps happiest...