Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead, OM FRS (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, theology, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education. Whitehead supervised the doctoral dissertations of Bertrand Russell and Willard Van Orman Quine, thus influencing logic and virtually all of analytic philosophy. He co-authored the epochal Principia Mathematica with Russell and later the metaphysical treatise Process and Reality.

Read more about Alfred North Whitehead:  Life, Ideas, Bibliography

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    Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
    Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)

    In England if something goes wrong—say, if one finds a skunk in the garden—he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift.
    —Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)

    Why does man freeze to death trying to reach the North Pole? Why does man drive himself to suffer the steam and heat of the Amazon? Why does he stagger his mind with the mathematics of the sky? Once the question mark has arisen in the human brain the answer must be found, if it takes a hundred years. A thousand years.
    Walter Reisch (1903–1963)

    Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
    —Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)