Shooting Star: The Brief and Brilliant Life of Frank Ramsey

At the age of 26, most of us are just embarking on life. But by that age, Frank Ramsey, one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, had come up with major new ideas in mathematics, philosophy and economics. And then (in 1930) he died. This first account of Ramsey’s life and ideas shows an engaging, down-to-earth, flawed genius as he startled and amazed 1920s Cambridge, at a time when there was no shortage of geniuses in the university. His early tragic death shocked and dismayed friends like Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell, but it is only in the last twenty or thirty years that the true significance of his ideas has become apparent to the wider world.