100 Years Since Principia Mathematica

A hundred years ago this month the first volume of Whitehead and Russell’s nearly-2000-page monumental work Principia Mathematica was published. A decade in the making, it contained page after page like the one below, devoted to showing how the truths of mathematics could be derived from logic.

The cardinal number 1

Principia Mathematica is inspiring for the obvious effort put into it—and as someone who has spent much of their life engaged in very large intellectual projects, I feel a certain sympathy towards it.


For additional perspectives on related topics see “Logic, Explainability and the Future of Understanding” (2018) »

In my own work, Mathematica shares with Principia Mathematica the goal of formalizing mathematics—but by building on the concept of computation, it takes a rather different approach, with a quite different outcome. And in A New Kind of Science, one of my objectives, also like Principia Mathematica, was to understand what lies beneath mathematics—though again my conclusion is quite different from Principia Mathematica.

Ever since Euclid there had been the notion of mathematical proof as a formal activity. But there had always been a tacit assumption that mathematics—with its numbers and geometrical figures—was still at some level talking about things in the natural world.

In the mid-1800s, however, that began to change, notably with the introduction of non-Euclidean geometries and algebras other than those of ordinary numbers. And by the end of the 1800s, there was a general movement towards thinking of mathematics as abstract formalism, independent of the natural world.

Meanwhile, ever since Aristotle, there had in a sense been another kind of formalism—logic—which was originally intended to represent specific kinds of idealized human arguments, but had gradually become assumed to represent any valid form of reasoning.  For most of its history, logic had been studied, and taught, quite separately from mathematics. But in the 1800s, there began to be connections.

George Boole showed how basic logic could be formulated in algebraic terms (“Boolean algebra”). And then Gottlob Frege, working in some isolation in Germany, developed predicate logic (“for all”, “there exists”, etc.), and used a version of set theory to try to describe numbers and mathematics in purely logical terms.

And it was into this context that Principia Mathematica was born. Its two authors brought different things to the project. Alfred North Whitehead was an established Cambridge academic, who, in 1898, at the age of 38, had published A Treatise on Universal Algebra “to present a thorough investigation of the various systems of Symbolic Reasoning allied to ordinary Algebra”. The book discussed Boolean algebra, quaternions and the theory of matrices—using them as the basis for a clean, if fairly traditional, treatment of topics in algebra and geometry.

Bertrand Russell was a decade younger. He had studied mathematics as an undergraduate in Cambridge, and by 1900,  at the age of 28, he had already published books ranging in topic from German social democracy, to foundations of geometry, and the philosophy of Leibniz.

The nature of mathematics and mathematical truth was a common subject of debate among philosophers—-as it had been at some level since Plato—and Russell seems to have believed that by making use of the latest advances, he could once and for all resolve the debates. In 1903, he published The Principles of Mathematics, volume 1 (no volume 2 was ever published)—in essence a survey, without formalism, of how standard areas of mathematics could be viewed in logical terms.

His basic concept was that by tightening up all relevant definitions using logic, it should be possible to derive every part of mathematics in a rigorous way, and thereby immediately answer questions about its nature and philosophy. But in 1901, as he tried to understand the concept of infinity in logical terms, and thought about ancient logical problems like the liar’s paradox (“this statement is false”), he came across what seemed to be a fundamental inconsistency: a paradox of self reference (“Russell’s Paradox”) about whether the set of all sets that do not contain themselves in fact contains itself.

To resolve this, Russell introduced what is often viewed as his most original contribution to mathematical logic: his theory of types—which in essence tries to distinguish between sets, sets of sets, etc. by considering them to be of different “types”, and then restricts how they can be combined. I must say that I consider types to be something of a hack. And indeed I have always felt that the related idea of “data types” has very much served to hold up the long-term development of  programming languages. (Mathematica, for example, gets great flexibility precisely from avoiding the use of types—even if internally it does use something like them to achieve various practical efficiencies.)

But back around 1900, as both Russell and Whitehead were trying to extend their formalizations of mathematics, they decided to launch into the project that would consume a decade of their lives, and become Principia Mathematica.

Particularly since the work of Gottfried Leibniz in the late 1600s, there had been discussion of developing a notation for mathematics that transcended the imprecision of human language.  In 1879 Gottlob Frege introduced his Begriffsschrift (“concept script”)—which was a major advance in concepts and functionality, but had a strange two-dimensional layout that was almost impossible to read, or to print economically. And in the 1880s, Giuseppe Peano developed a cleaner and more linear notation, much of which is still in use today.

It did not help the dissemination of Peano’s work that he chose to write his narrative text in a language of his own construction (based on classical Latin) called Interlingua. But still, in 1900, Russell went to a back-to-back pair of conferences in Paris about philosophy and mathematics (notable for being where Hilbert announced his problems), met Peano and became convinced that his attempt to formalize mathematics should be based on Peano’s notation and approach. (Russell gave a distinctly pre-relativistic philosophical talk at the conference about absolute ordering of spatiotemporal events, while his wife Alys gave a talk about the education of women.)

The idea that mathematics could be built up from a small initial set of axioms had existed since the time of Euclid. But Russell and Whitehead wanted to have the smallest possible set, and have them be based not on ideas derived from observing the natural world, but instead on what they felt was the more solid and universal ground of logic.

With present-day experience of computers and programming it does not seem surprising that with enough “code” one should be able to start from basic concepts of logic and sets, and successfully build up numbers and the other standard constructs of mathematics. And indeed Frege, Peano and others had already started this process before 1900. But by its very weightiness, Principia Mathematica made the point seem both surprising and impactful.

Of course, it did not hurt the whole impression that it took until more than 80 pages into volume 2 to be able to prove (as “Proposition *110.643”) that 1+1=2 (with the comment “[This] proposition is occasionally useful”).


I do not know if Russell and Whitehead intended Principia Mathematica to be readable by humans—but in the end Russell estimated years later that only perhaps 6 people had ever read the whole thing. To modern eyes, the use of Peano’s dot notation instead of parentheses is particularly difficult. And then there is the matter of definitions.

At the end of volume 1, Principia Mathematica lists about 500 “definitions”, each with a special notation. In many ways, these are the analogs of the built-in functions of Mathematica.  But in Principia Mathematica, instead of being given English-based names, all these objects are assigned special notations. The first handful are not too difficult to understand. But by the second page one’s seeing all sorts of strange glyphs, and I, at least, lose hope of ever being able to decipher what is written in them.

List of Definitions

List of Definitions

Beyond these notational issues, there is a much more fundamental difference between the formalization of mathematics in Principia Mathematica and in Mathematica. For in Principia Mathematica the objective is to exhibit true theorems of mathematics, and to represent the processes involved in proving them. But in Mathematica, the objective is instead to compute: to take mathematical expressions, and evaluate them.

(These differences in objective lead to many differences in character. For example, Principia Mathematica is constantly trying to give constraints that indirectly specify whatever structure it wants to talk about. In Mathematica, the whole idea is to have explicit symbolic structures that can then be computed with.)

In the hundred years since Principia Mathematica, there has been slow progress in presenting theorems of mathematics in formal ways. But the idea of mathematical computation has taken off spectacularly—and has transformed the use of mathematics, and many areas of its development.

But what about the conceptual purposes of Principia Mathematica? Russell explained in the introduction to his The Principles of Mathematics that he intended to “reduce the whole of [the propositions of mathematics] to certain fundamental notions of logic”. Indeed, he even made what he considered to be a very general definition of “pure mathematics”  as all true logical statements that contain only variables like p and q, and not literals like “the city of New York”. (Applied mathematics, he suggested, would come from replacing the variables by literals.)

But why start from logic? I think Russell just assumed that logic was the most fundamental possible thing—the ultimate incontrovertible representation for all formal processes. Traditional mathematical constructs—like numbers and space—he imagined were associated with the particulars of our world. But logic, he imagined, was a kind of “pure thought”, and something more general, and wholly independent of the particulars of our world.

In my own work leading up to A New Kind of Science, I started by studying the natural world, yet found myself increasingly being led to generalize beyond traditional mathematical constructs. But I did not wind up with logic. Instead, I began to consider all possible kinds of rules—or as I have tended to describe it (making use of modern experience), the computational universe of all possible programs.

Some of these programs describe parts of the natural world. Some give us interesting fodder for technology. And some correspond to traditional formal systems like logic and mathematics.

One thing to do is to look at the space of all possible axiom systems. There are some technical issues about modern equational systems compared to implicational systems of the kind considered in Principia Mathematica. But the essential result is that dotted around the space of all possible axiom systems are the particular axiom systems that have historically arisen in the development of mathematics and related fields.

Is logic somehow special? I think not.

In Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead originally defined logic using a fairly complicated traditional set of axioms. In the second edition of the book, they made a point of noting that by writing everything in terms of Nand (Sheffer stroke) rather than And, Or and Not, it is possible to use a much simpler axiom system.

In 2000, by doing a search of the space of possible axiom systems, I was able to find the very simplest (equational) axiom system for standard propositional logic: just the single axiom ((a.b).c).(a.((a.c).a)) = c. And from this result, we can tell where logic lies in the space of possible formal systems: in a natural enumeration of axiom systems in order of size, it is about the 50,000th formal system that one would encounter.

A few other traditional areas of mathematics—like group theory—occur in a comparable place. But most require much larger axiom systems.  And in the end the picture seems very different from the one Russell and Whitehead imagined. It is not that logic—as conceived by human thought—is at the root of everything.  Instead, there are a multitude of possible formal systems, some picked by the natural world, some picked by historical developments in mathematics, but most out there uninvestigated.

In writing Principia Mathematica, one of Russell’s principal objectives was to give evidence that all of mathematics really could be derived from logic. And indeed the very heft of the book gave immediate support to this idea, and gave such credibility to logic (and to Russell) that Russell was able to spend much of the rest of his long life confidently presenting logic as a successful way to address moral, social and political issues.

Of course, in 1931 Kurt Godel showed that no finite system—logic or anything else—can be used to derive all of mathematics. And indeed the very title of his paper refers to the incompleteness of none other than the formal system of Principia Mathematica. By this time, however, both Russell and Whitehead had moved on to other pursuits, and neither returned to address the implications of Godel’s Theorem for their project.

So can one say that the idea of logic somehow underlying mathematics is wrong? At a conceptual level, I think so. But in a strange twist of history, logic is currently precisely what is actually used to implement mathematics.

For inside all current computers are circuits consisting of millions of logic gates—each typically performing a Nand operation. And so, for example, when Mathematica runs on a computer, and implements the operations of mathematics, it does so precisely by marshalling the logic operations in the hardware of the computer. (To be clear, the logic implemented by computers is basic, propositional, logic—not the more elaborate predicate logic, combined with set theory, that Principia Mathematica ultimately uses.)

We know from computational universality—and more precisely from the Principle of Computational Equivalence—that things do not have to work this way, and that there are many very different bases for computation that could be used.  And indeed, as computers move to a molecular scale, standard logic will most likely no longer be the most convenient basis to use.

But so why is logic used in today’s computers? I suspect it actually has quite a bit to do with none other than Principia Mathematica. For historically Principia Mathematica did much to promote the importance and primacy of logic, and the glow that it left is in many ways still with us today. It is just that we now understand that logic is just one possible basis for what we can do—not the only conceivable one.

(People familiar with technical aspects of logic may protest that the notion of “truth” is somehow intimately tied to traditional logic.  I think this is a matter of definition, but in any case, what has become clear for mathematics is that it is vastly more important to compute answers than merely to state truths.)

A hundred years after Principia Mathematica there is still much that we do not understand even about basic questions in the foundations of mathematics. And it is humbling to wonder what progress could be made over the next hundred years.

When we look at Principia Mathematica, it emphasizes exhibiting particular truths of mathematics that its authors derived. But today Mathematica in effect every day automatically delivers millions of truths of mathematics, made to order for a multitude of particular purposes.

Yet it is still the case that it operates with just a few formal systems that happen to have been studied in mathematics or elsewhere. And even in A New Kind of Science, I concentrated on particular programs or systems that for one reason or another I thought were interesting.

In the future, however, I suspect that there will be another level of automation. Probably it will take much less than a hundred years, but in time it will become commonplace not just to make computations to order, but to make to order the very systems on which those computations are based—in effect in the blink of an eye inventing and developing something like a whole Principia Mathematica to respond to some particular purpose.



    Thank you, thank you. This is an amazing post. A wonderful alternative to football after thanksgiving dinner. Please keep up the great blog posts.


    Fascinating blog post. Looking forward to purchasing the home version of Mathematica 8.

    Robert L.

    From the post, above:

    “… what has become clear for mathematics is that it is vastly more important to compute answers than merely to state truths.”

    Are not computed answers merely truths?

    It seems to me that anything one calls a “logic” is merely an attempt to formally express something one might call a “universal truth”, or a truth upon which every rational being could agree. Given a set of these (or a single one, as you pointed out), Principia Mathematica is nothing more – or less – than the attempt to build a “theory of everything mathematical” from those axioms.

    Given equivalence in all its forms, there has never been a reason one could not construct something similar about the exact same subject – or any subject – using any equivalent set of axioms. They could be a different axiom, a different symbol and meaning-set, or something as abstracted – and otherwise concrete – as levers, pulleys, rubber-bands, rope and bearings. “Logic” as we know it was just an attempt.

    I’d be very fascinated to see what problems might be solved with some new system, rather than systems based upon what we’ve been using. What type of problem might yield to this system? Might our very notions of computability be challenged?


      Dear hoppah,

      Thanks for your message. You touch upon an enthralling concept, the concept of truth in mathematics. Truth in mathematics is not an absolute concept. It depends on the mathematical theory being referenced, and it was disconnected from the concept of proof by Kurt Gödel in the early ’30s. What Gödel did was to show that one can know the truth of a mathematical fact in a theory and yet not be able to prove the truth in question from within said theory. More specifically, what Gödel did was to prove that a theory capable of performing standard arithmetic is either inconsistent, meaning that one can prove any statement using the theory (even contradictory statements), or incomplete, meaning that there will be some “truths” in the theory that cannot be proven from within the theory. Notice the quotation marks around “truths” –because only at the meta-theoretical level can something be known as a truth, that is, from outside the original theory.

      You may think then that all truths could be known and proven at the meta-theoretical level, but Gödel also showed that no matter how far outside the original theory you go, there will always be some truths that escape it, no matter that each meta-theory contains the previous one, going all the way back to the original “theory”–unless you make your meta-theory inconsistent (which is uninteresting because in an inconsistent theory everything is true and false at the same time).

      On the other hand, it turns out that Gödel’s work is also relevant to the question of whether two sets of axioms are equivalent (if they imply each other). His work indicates that such a question is undecidable, that is, that there is no way to decide whether they are really equivalent or not. Analogously, Alan Turing’s work on computation proves there is no algorithm to decide the matter.

      As you say, “logic” or a certain “logic” is an attempt at formalization, of traditional mathematics in the case of Principia Mathematica. You are right to wonder whether other foundations may lead us to essentially different systems. This is indeed the case. What the post stresses is that the specific choice made in Principia Mathematica may have nothing more special or fundamental about it than any other choice, such as a framework in which computation is at a lower or a more fundamental level. Yet the computational approach may be much more natural, in that it seems to make sense that natural processes follow simple rules while it is hard to think of them as performing logical operations. Computed answers are like proofs (there is an actual mathematical correspondence). They are a set of rules with no truth value. Whether today’s weather has a truth value for someone is a matter of meaning, but meaning is not something that can be delivered by the system itself. So like Gödel’s sense of proof, computation too is fundamentally different from truth.

      Thanks for your comment.

      Hector Z.
      Wolfram Research

      Stephanie Prather

    Considering Russell’s theory of types “to be something of a hack” is courageous. Following this thought to typed programming languages is even more courageous, because in Mathematica every expression has to have a head, which is it’s type in a way. But the good thing in Mathematica is that one can change that type (head) into another type (head) – strongly typed programming languages usually try to prevent this operation, allowing only for a few casts.

    But what about physics? Here the types are the units (m, kg, s, Kelvin, …) and the big deal is to express the energy (or more precisely the action) in as many ways as possible. If it does not work, one has to search for a new (universal) constant. For example, Planck’s constant allows to express the energy using a frequency – pretty cool.

    Do you think units in physics are a hack (because researchers did not yet find all universal constants) and if yes, how would you formulate an action principle?

    U. Krause

    Re: Axiomatics

    Axiomatics is the foundation of both mathematics and natural languages, and perhaps much more. For what is the simplest axiom? Is it not “A symbol represents something.”? Therefore, axiomatics is the foundation of both mathematics and natural languages, for both mathematics and natural languages are systems of symbols that represent things.

    Thank you for this blog: I love it! :-)

    Steve Zimmerman

    Isn’t discreteness the basis of current day computing as well as the basis of logic? In fact, discreteness, being the delineation of one from the other at a discrete point (in 1 dimensional space), is what would seem to be the basis of classical mechanics from a layman’s point of view even though in ‘reality’, classical mechanics is not discrete because of the ever present and frequently overlooked error.

    The ‘need’ for statistical mechanics as the carrier for quantum mechanics has exemplified the inability of maintaining discreteness and in the process emphasized the use of ranges which are effectively unbounded.

    You can’t resolve whether ‘reality’ is ultimately discrete (digital) or unbounded without being biased towards one or the other. Being discrete, digital or logical simply makes ‘reasoning’ or computation much easier and apparently more precise or at least tractable.

    Using and researching cellular automata is very promising considering the mix of discrete relationships when set in an unbounded context while it would seem to be ‘easier’ than investigating its reciprocal of dense relationships in a bounded context.

    It would seem that Principia Mathematica has done or begun precisely that; in its quest to formalize at a discrete level, it has inadvertently hit upon the (potentially) infinite density of relationships.


    Amazing ideas! Taking computation beyond Boolean logic of the transistor and electrons and somehow just letting the atomic world do all the computations for you, yet in a logically consistent way. WOW, I am buying Stephen Wolframs book. Thank you.

    Jordan Pani

    With the application of mathematics, I have thought about being a professor in a day. But I have difficulties to explain it, especially by using non-Indonesian language. This message was created premises aid “means an interpreter” (Google).


    Nasrullah Idris – Indonesia


    i want to apply the forms and syntaxes of bertrand russell’s logic to the real world . i want to obtain a formal logical expression for real life. f.g. i want to formulize pebbles, trees, etc. in the form of mathematical logic . carnap’s project is simillar to this. please introduce some good refrences that help me in my research . this is my thesis in the university.
    thank you


    Fantastic review and analysis. Thanks for writing and sharing this!

    S. D.

    Great essay. Would’ve been nice to see you fit von Neumann & Quine in there somewhere, as they both are major characters in a story like this. Alas, after 8 years, I’m sure you’ve since “…moved on to other pursuits…” too

    Late to the Party

    Bertrand Russel came up on my news feed recently: https://thehumanist.com/magazine/march-april-2020/features/peace-love-and-mathiness

    It’s been about 50 years since he died. This reminded me of reading him when I was in college (mostly for his works on Atheism), and I remembered he wrote Principia Mathematica, and I started to look into it. And so I found this article.

    Now, I’m not a mathematician, and so I don’t pretend to understand PM, but a quick read about it on wikipedia reveals that it has been replaced by Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. And an extension of ZF set theory, Tarski–Grothendieck set theory, has been used in proof checking software such as Mizar and Metamath, which contain large databases of proved theorems.

    So, in the end, these systems have achieved what Russell and Whitehead set out to do so many years before. In that sense, I think PM was a success, in that it inspired many others to refine set theory and develop automated proof checking.

    I would be interested to hear more about proof checking software and its relationship to your Mathematica.

    Thanks for the interesting article.

    Gregory Holmberg

    Wow Stephen have you been reading Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?

    Or A Perfect Universe – Thad Roberts?

    Any chance of a place on your upcoming webinar?

    Jonathan Lister