Frank P. Ramsey

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Frank Plumpton Ramsey (February 22, 1903 – January 19, 1930) was a British mathematician, philosopher, and economist.

Contents

1 History
2 Writings
3 Early death
4 Noted brother
5 See also
6 Further reading
7 External links

History

Ramsey was born in Cambridge where his father was President (i.e. Vice-Master) of Magdalene College. He was educated at Winchester College before returning to Cambridge to study mathematics at Trinity College.

Ramsey's intelligence was remarkable, and impressed many academics at Cambridge. He was well-read in a wide array of fields, having an interest in almost anything. In politics, he had left-wing leanings; and in religion he was, according to his wife, "a militant atheist". In one of his conversations with C. K. Ogden, he expressed his desire to learn German. Ogden gave him a grammar, a dictionary, and an abstruse psychological treatise and told him: "Use the grammar and use the dictionary and come and tell us what you think." About a week later, Ramsey had not only learnt the language, but had also come up with objections to the theory advanced in the book. He later used his acquisition to read Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which impressed him deeply. In 1923 he travelled to Austria to discuss it with Wittgenstein, who was then working as a teacher in a small village. Ramsey was instrumental in persuading Wittgenstein that his research in philosophy was incomplete, and to take up residence at Cambridge.

Back in England, in 1924 he became a fellow of King's College at the young age of 21. He produced a prodigious amount of work in the areas of the logic, economics and philosophy.

Writings

In 1927 Ramsey published the influential article Facts and Propositions, in which he proposed the first Redundancy theory of truth.

One of the theorems proved by Ramsey in his 1930 paper On a problem of formal logic, which sparked the growth in this field, now bears his name (see Ramsey theory and Ramsey's theorem). It was an important early result in combinatorics, supporting the idea that within some sufficiently large systems, however disordered, there must be some order.

His immortal contribution to economic theory was the elegant concept of Ramsey pricing. This is applicable in situations where a (regulated) monopolist wants to maximise consumer surplus whilst at the same time ensuring that its costs are adequately covered. This is achieved by setting the price such that the markup over marginal cost is inversely proportional to the price elasticity of demand for that good. See A contribution to the theory of taxation (Economic Journal March 1927) and A mathematical theory of saving.

Ramsey was a good friend of economist John Maynard Keynes whose work on probability stimulated Ramsey to develop arguments for subjective probability (Bayesian probability). His 1926 essay Truth and Probability (published posthumously in 1931) anticipated many of the developments in mathematical decision theory later made by John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern, Leonard J. Savage, and others. As with the similar development by Bruno de Finetti the work only became well known in the 1950s.

His philosophical works included Universals (1925), Facts and propositions (1927), Universals of law and of fact (1928), Knowledge (1929), Theories (1929), and General propositions and causality (1929). A few philosophers consider him to have been, or at least to have had the potential to be, an even greater philosopher than Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein mentions him in the introduction to his Philosophical Investigations as an influence (but not as great an influence as Piero Sraffa).

Early death

Unfortunately suffering from chronic liver problems, Ramsey contracted jaundice after an abdominal operation and died in 1930 at the age of 26, ending a highly promising career too early.

The Decision Analysis Society awards annually the Frank P. Ramsey Medal to recognise substantial contributions to decision theory and its application to important classes of real decision problems.

Noted brother

Frank Ramsey's younger brother, Arthur Michael Ramsey, was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974.

External links

[Appreciation of Frank]
John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson. [] at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
[Comprehensive resource on Ramsey]
[Short Ramsey biography]
[Realaudio BBC profile of Ramsey from 1978, & transcript]
[Frank Ramsey (1903-1930)]
[Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Interpretations of Probability.] See 3.5 (3.2) for Ramsey's (Keynes's) views on probability.

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