Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers
Richard Weber
Abstract
I am pleased to have become acquainted with the truly exceptional genius of Frank Ramsey through Cheryl Misak’s absorbing biography. Delightfully, I found much in his life story to connect with my own, as others will also surely do. For, as Misak tells us, ‘Ramsey made contributions to seven disciplines, depending how you count’ (p.xxiv). In four of these, I owe debts to Ramsey, although sometimes unknowingly: pure mathematics, economics, probability theory, and decision theory. The remaining three, analytic philosophy, mathematical logic, and the foundations of mathematics, are outside my studies, but thanks to Misak I can now appreciate Ramsey’s contributions. Misak, who knows the milieu of Oxbridge from her time at Balliol College, is very informative about Cambridge in the 1920s. Ramsey came top of the 1919 scholarship entry papers for Peterhouse, Magdalene and Queens’ (my college—if only we had had him!) but entered a year later,...