Russell’s Paradox

Bertrand Russell is truly an interesting human being whose contributions to our existence

and society were extremely undervalued. Throughout his long life, he made it a point to dabble

in as much as possible. From working with Albert Einstein, being a prime organizer for the

Pugwash Conferences, lecturing at many prestigious universities, spending time in jail on more

than one occasion, creating the Peace Foundation, and being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in

literature (Deutsch & Irvine, 2022), this man has made a lasting impression on who we are as a

species. And though some people will argue if he was a good or bad man or not, what cannot be

argued is his contributions to the world of mathematics, especially his contributions to set theory.

Born in Monmouthshire, UK on May 18th, 1872, Russell was introduced to geometry by his

brother Frank (Deutsch & Irvine, 2022) which, to me, seems like the catalyst for who he became.

He started his studies at Cambridge and received a BA in math and from then on would lecture

across the world. During that time, he discovered what is considered to be a huge contribution to

the study and history of set theory and logic and what we now know as Russell’s Paradox or The

Russell-Zermelo Paradox, which pays homage to Ernst Zermelo who also spoke about this

concept (Deutsch & Irvine, 2020).

Russell’s Paradox states that the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, cannot

exist. In other words, if something (let us use the letter B) is a member of itself, then by default it

cannot be a member of itself, and vice versa (Deutsch & Irvine, 2020). This paradox released a

domino effect into the world of Set Theory that we know today and paved the way for deeper

studies and other revelations, and we have Bertrand Russell to thank for that.
 References

 Irvine, Andrew David and Harry Deutsch, "Russell’s Paradox", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/russell-paradox/>.

 Irvine, Andrew David, "Bertrand Russell", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring
2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/russell/>.