Key facts
- Author
- Alfred North Whitehead Bertrand Russell
- Language
- English
- Subject
- Foundations of mathematics
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date
- 1910–1913
- Text
- Principia Mathematica at Wikisource
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- book series
- Author
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Genre
- essay
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Main subject
- mathematics
- Image
- Russell, Whitehead - Principia Mathematica to 56.jpg
Show 6 more facts
- language of work or name
- English language
- Commons category
- Principia Mathematica
- title
- Principia Mathematica
- publication date
- 1917-00-00
- number of parts of this work
- 3
- copyright status
- public domain
Sources (3)
via Wikidata · CC0
~40 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Principia Mathematica (often abbreviated PM) is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by the mathematician–philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. In 1925–1927, it appeared in a second edition with an important Introduction to the Second Edition, an Appendix A (that replaced ✱9), and with an additional new Appendix B and Appendix C. PM was conceived as a sequel to Russell's 1903 The Principles of Mathematics, but as PM states, this became an unworkable suggestion for practical and philosophical reasons: "The present work was originally intended by us to be comprised in a second volume of Principles of Mathematics ... But as we advanced, it became increasingly evident that the subject is a very much larger one than we had supposed; moreover on many fundamental questions which had been left obscure and doubtful in the former work, we have now arrived at what we believe to be satisfactory solutions."
PM, according to its introduction, had three aims:
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Principia Mathe” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.