Frank Ramsey : a sheer excess of powers

"Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers is an intellectual biography of one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of the last century. Ramsey was the youngest member of a group of Cambridge luminaries - Russell, Moore, Keynes, Wittgenstein, Strachey, Woolf - whose influence still shines brightly. Keynes identified him as a major talent when he was an undergraduate and made him a fellow of King's College at the age of 21. He was at least Wittgenstein's equal in philosophy. He was the originator of two branches of economics and one branch of pure mathematics. His work on choice under conditions of uncertainty underpins much of contemporary economics, as well as decision theory and Bayesian statistics. All this, and more, from someone who died in 1930 at the age of 26. Beyond his scholarship, Ramsey had a fascinating life. He began his Cambridge undergraduate degree just after the Great War ended; he was part of the race to be psychoanalyzed in Vienna in the 1920s; he was a core member of the secret Cambridge discussion society, the Apostles, during one of its most vital periods; he was part of the Bloomsbury set of writers and artists and the Guild Socialist movement. An examination of his life sheds light on these significant intellectual and cultural movements. Indeed, it sheds light on the very meaning of life, not only by considering one extraordinary life, but in thinking through what Ramsey himself, in one of his most poignant papers, said about the topic."