76 THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020
Frank Ramsey not only died young but lived too early, or so it can seem.
BOOKS
THE THINKER’S THINKER
We’re still catching up with one of the greatest minds of the last century.
BY ANTHONYGOTTLIEB
ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR TAYLOR
“
T
he world will never know what
has happened—what a light has
gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Stra-
chey, a member of London’s Blooms-
bury literary set, wrote to a friend on
January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lec-
turer in mathematics at Cambridge
University, had died that day at the
age of twenty-six, probably from a
liver infection that he may have picked
up during a swim in the River Cam.
“There was something of Newton
about him,” Strachey continued. “The
ease and majesty of the thought—the
gentleness of the temperament.”
Dons at Cambridge had known for
a while that there was a sort of mar-
vel in their midst: Ramsey made his
mark soon after his arrival as an un-
dergraduate at Newton’s old college,
Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the
age of eighteen to produce the English
translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the
most talked-about philosophy book of
the time; two years later, he published
a critique of it in the leading philoso-
phy journal in English, Mind. G. E.
Moore, the journal’s editor, who had
been lecturing at Cambridge for a de-
cade before Ramsey turned up, con-
fessed that he was “distinctly nervous”
when this first-year student was in the
audience, because he was “very much
cleverer than I was.” John Maynard
Keynes was one of several Cambridge
economists who deferred to the un-
dergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and
intellectual prowess.
When Ramsey later published a
paper about rates of saving, Keynes
called it “one of the most remarkable
contributions to mathematical eco-
nomics ever made.” Its most contro-
versial idea was that the well-being of
future generations should be given the
same weight as that of the present one.
Discounting the interests of future
people, Ramsey wrote, is “ethically in-
defensible and arises merely from the
weakness of the imagination.” In the
wake of the Great Depression, econ-
omists had more pressing concerns;
only decades later did the paper’s enor-
mous impact arrive. And so it went
with most of Ramsey’s work. His con-
tribution to pure mathematics was
tucked away inside a paper on some-
thing else. It consisted of two theo-
rems that he used to investigate the
procedures for determining the valid-
ity of logical formulas. More than forty
years after they were published, these
two tools became the basis of a branch
of mathematics known as Ramsey the-
ory, which analyzes order and disor-
der. (As an Oxford mathematician,
Martin Gould, has explained, Ramsey
theory tells us, for instance, that among
any six users of Facebook there will
always be either a trio of mutual friends
or a trio in which none are friends.)
Ramsey not only died young but
lived too early, or so it can seem. He
did little to advertise the importance
of his ideas, and his modesty did not
help. He was not particularly impressed
with himself—he thought he was rather
lazy. At the same time, the speed with
which his mind worked sometimes left
a blur on the page. The prominent
American philosopher Donald David-
son was one of several thinkers to ex-
perience what he dubbed “the Ram-
sey effect.” You’d make a thrilling
breakthrough only to find that Ram-
sey had got there first.
There was also the problem of Witt-
genstein, whose looming example and
cultlike following distracted attention
from Ramsey’s ideas for decades. But
Ramsey rose again. Economists now
study Ramsey pricing; mathematicians
