Bertrand Russell discovered mathematics at the age of eleven. It was, he recalled, a transporting experience: "as dazzling as first love".
From that moment on, he would pursue his passion with undying devotion and all but erotic ferveur. Mathematics might succeed, he felt, where philosophy had failed, reducing thought to its purest form, and freeing knowledge from doubt and contradiction.
And so, for a time, it seemed, Russell's mathema...
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