Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher, born in 1861 and died in 1947, who created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, later applied across disciplines including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics and psychology. In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic and physics, co-authoring the three-volume Principia Mathematica with his former student Bertrand Russell between 1910 and 1913, a work considered one of the twentieth century's most important contributions to mathematical logic. Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s Whitehead gradually turned from mathematics to the philosophy of science and finally to metaphysics, developing a comprehensive system that departed radically from most of Western philosophy by arguing that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that those processes are best understood through their relations to other processes rather than as independently existing bits of matter. His philosophical works, especially Process and Reality, are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.