Frank Ramsey was born in January 1903. He died a month before his 27th birthday in 1930. He was, by all accounts, a genius, but also modest and a critic of the faddish Wittgenstein. Anthony Gottlieb reviews Cheryl Misak’s biography:

‘The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out,’ the belletrist Lytton Strachey, a member of London’s Bloomsbury literary set, wrote to a friend on January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. ‘There was something of Newton about him,’ Strachey continued. ‘The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.’

Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst: Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton’s old college, Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the age of eighteen to produce the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the most talked-about philosophy book of the time; two years later, he published a critique of it in the leading philosophy journal in English, Mind. G. E. Moore, the journal’s editor, who had been lecturing at Cambridge for a decade before Ramsey turned up, confessed that he was ‘distinctly nervous’ when this first-year student was in the audience, because he was ‘very much cleverer than I was.’ John Maynard Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the undergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and intellectual prowess.

When Ramsey later published a paper about rates of saving, Keynes called it ‘one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made.’ Its most controversial idea was that the well-being of future generations should be given the same weight as that of the present one. Discounting the interests of future people, Ramsey wrote, is ‘ethically indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the imagination.’ In the wake of the Great Depression, economists had more pressing concerns; only decades later did the paper’s enormous impact arrive. And so it went with most of Ramsey’s work. His contribution to pure mathematics was tucked away inside a paper on something else. It consisted of two theorems that he used to investigate the procedures for determining the validity of logical formulas. More than forty years after they were published, these two tools became the basis of a branch of mathematics known as Ramsey theory, which analyzes order and disorder. (As an Oxford mathematician, Martin Gould, has explained, Ramsey theory tells us, for instance, that among any six users of Facebook there will always be either a trio of mutual friends or a trio in which none are friends.)

Ramsey not only died young but lived too early, or so it can seem. He did little to advertise the importance of his ideas, and his modesty did not help. He was not particularly impressed with himself—he thought he was rather lazy. At the same time, the speed with which his mind worked sometimes left a blur on the page. The prominent American philosopher Donald Davidson was one of several thinkers to experience what he dubbed ‘the Ramsey effect.’ You’d make a thrilling breakthrough only to find that Ramsey had got there first.

In other news: Jay-Z takes legal action against deepfakes of him rapping Hamlet and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

Sally Thomas has won the J. F. Powers award for fiction. Congratulations, Sally!

The New York Post to make cuts following a “significant decrease in the advertising demand” due to the coronavirus.

Nicholas Gallagher reviews Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light: “The third book in what was announced as a trilogy was supposed to come out in 2018. Then, 2017 brought rumors of delay . . . 2018 . . . 2019 . . . The literati thought they knew why. While the Wolf Hall novels are fiction, their characters are, of course, historical figures. And Thomas Cromwell, after triumphing over More and Anne Boleyn, overseeing the dissolution of the monasteries, procuring Henry VIII’s marriages to his third and fourth wives, and significantly advancing the cause of Protestantism in England, was executed by orders of that monarch on July 28, 1540. If Mantel finished her trilogy, in other words, she was going to have to kill her hero. Now the third book, The Mirror and the Light, is here. Read page by page — that is to say, taking the measure of the book by the quality of the prose — it is another masterpiece, a worthy successor to its forebears. There are some reasons, however, to think that the rumors were right — that the death of Cromwell presented a challenge for Mantel.”

Roberta Smith writes about America’s forgotten modernist: “Alice Trumbull Mason, a painter who never got her due, turned to abstraction at 25, in 1929, when its American adherents were few and it was viewed as a foreign, even Communist element. She was inspired by the art of Wassily Kandinsky and by Arshile Gorky, one of Abstract Expressionism’s founders, with whom she studied. Her belief that abstraction was, in her words, ‘the true realism’ never wavered — nor did she ever run out of ideas over her 40-year career.”

Photo: Tschagguns

Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Daedal”

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