A fascinating at one of the seminal minds of the 20th century - affected many fields of thought. Died while still a very young man. ( )

This Kindle single biography of the mathematician/philosopher/economist Frank Ramsey is about 60 book pages long. Which is 10 pages for each of Ramsey's adult years--he tragically died at age 26 having translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus at age 19 and impressed some of the biggest giants in Cambridge thought like Wittgenstein, Keynes and Russell, in many cases disproving these venerable masters. The Kindle Single is nearly 4 pages for each of his 16 published papers, many of which blazed completely new and original avenues of thought in a variety of subjects. In any case, the proportions of the Kindle Single are not well short of a more traditional-length biography for a more traditional length of time. Which is to say it could have been the perfect length but for the fact that Karl Sabbagh spends much more time and energy on Ramsey's (rather ordinary) sexual hangups that he does not do anything close to justice to Ramsey's contributions to economics, philosophy, and mathematics--let alone even attempting to figure out where his thoughts came from, what he was motivated to do, and where he was going with all of it.

Sabbagh clearly did real work for the biography, drawing on diaries, letters, and even tracking down the one living person who knew Ramsey--a 102 year old woman. But when it comes to Ramsey's contributions, he quotes liberally from experts in the different fields (e.g., Partha Dasgupta for the economics papers) and does not do nearly enough to situate them in the periods and fields they came out of. The book is strong on Cambridge atmosphere in the 1920s, bits of the Bloomsbury Group, and the emergency of psychoanalysis, all of which make for interesting reading.

As for Ramsey's contributions, in economics they are to a normative model meant to determine how much a society should save that turned into a positive model with an infinitely lived representative agent. Also, the Ramsey rule for optimal taxation of different commodities which continues to be the departure point for work on optimal taxation, even if its restrictive assumptions like separability have long since been superseded. I have a harder time understanding Ramsey's contributions to philosophy and the philosophy of mathematics, but they seem to relate to shortcomings in the Russel-Whitehead view of the world which, as we know, was subsequently exploded by G̦del, although I could not tell how much Ramsey's work related to that or how much was still relevant. ( )