Worth it or not?: Bertrand Russell's "Principia Mathematica"

dlivingston

Evening,

As a physics undergrad, I feel that my understanding of mathematics is lacking – not in terms of how to do something, but in terms of why you'd do something. For example, why take the integral of Schrödinger's Equation? Why not derive it? Why derive velocity to find acceleration? (These are examples so you can see where I'm coming from)

So because of this, I'm interested in purchasing Principia Mathematica by one of my favorite philosophers, Bertrand Russell. Is it a worthy purchase? Will it help me understand the concepts, or is there anyone book you recommend?

Thanks for your help,
Daniel

AlephZero

You can read the whole three volumes online here, before you get your credit card out:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/u/umhistma...rowse;value=wh

It won't answer any of the questions in your OP, but if you like reading Russell, you will probably like the introductions to each section.

DonAntonio

I think Bertrand Russell is one of the greatest minds of the last two centuries and all his books are worth reading

even more than once, but his Principia is a very, overwhelmingly technical book. I don't think there are lots of people

who read it completely. You better check first what it is about before you buy it to read it, though I guess

it could be an important book for consultations for logicians.

DonAntonio

Stephen Tashi

Principia Mathematica could be read as a historial document, in the same manner that you could read Newton's Principia as a historial document in physics. Reading Newton's original work won't teach the modern approaches to classical phyics and it doesn't use modern notation. Reading Principia Mathematica won't teach you the modern approaches to mathematical logic and it doesn't use modern notation.

MathematicalPhysicist

I tried to read the first volume, the notation there is really hard to understand.

I don't think it's worth time spent, unless you want to become a logician, and even then not every logician has read these three gigantic volumes, I guess most logicians didn't read these volumes.

wisvuze

even logicians don't read this stuff.. it's mostly of historical importance at this point.

mathwonk

Its a great buy, and if you believe that, then I have a few thousand pages of class notes to offer you at a dollar a page.

To be honest, there do exist people who think that book is worth reading.


I do not personally know any of them.


Lets put it this way. DO NOT spend one cent on that book until going to the library or online and looking at it for a while.


I did that once and discovered that after a hundred pages or more of turgid nonsense they finally concluded something like 1+1 = 2.


So to me that book is just absurd. But I am a mathematician, not a philosopher or logician.

Skrew

The more rigid the foundation, the easier it is to break.

I don't know anything about Principia except that the author attempts to build everything from a rigid logic and set theory frame work and the entire work will come crashing down if an inconsistency is found.

Considering this I think the whole thing is kind of pointless. I think intuition as to why 1 + 1 = 2 is far more valuable then constructing the abstract mathematical object of 1 and 2 from it.

AlephZero

If you want the philosophy without the notation, a better place to start is Russell's "Principles of Mathematics", also online at U. Michigan:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/u/umhistma...rowse;value=ru