Shooting Star The Brief and Brilliant Life of Frank Ramsey (射击之星弗兰克拉姆塞的简短而辉煌的生活).pdf

SHOOTING STAR The Brief and Brilliant Lif e of Frank Ramsey KARL SABBAGH 1. ‘Damn my ambition!’ In January 1921, on a winter’s evening in Cambridge, a 17-year-old Trinity College undergraduate walked home after a student debate at the Union Society. He wrote in his diary that night: ‘Damn my ambition ! It is so much of the rotten kind — mere desire to be recognised as able than to be able; I spent 1½ hours preparing a good speech on National Ownership and control, spent 3 hours listening to by far the dullest debate I have ever heard, nearly all the speeches being far worse than mine, and then couldn’t deliver it.’ This was not a unique experience. The Cambridge Union Debating Society was a breeding ground for future British politicians, and the talent on display in its debates was, and is, formidable. But this undergraduate’s problem — as he saw it — was one which few of us have. It wasn’t lack of talent that worried him, but that he couldn’t add speech-making to a list of other glittering talents of a kind and extent which have rarely been compressed into one individual. As his diary entry continued: ‘I can’t do 4 things my 3 are Mathematics, Philosophy, and Political and Economic Theory — I can’t manage in addition oratory.’ In the three fields this undergraduate picked as the things he could ‘do’, he made major contributions, and all of them were achieved in the nine years after that lonely walk back to his college from the Union. The undergraduate’s name was Frank Ramsey. The fields of philosophy, economics and mathematics are sprinkled with Ramsey eponyms: philosophy has Ramsey’s Theory of Truth, Ramsey’s Maxim, and Ramsey Sentences; economics has Ramsey Pricing, Ramsey’s Theory of Preference, a Ramsey Theory of Saving and another of Taxation, and Ramsey’s Theory of Probability; mathematics