
Frank Ramsey: A Genius by All Tests for Genius - sillysaurusx
https://hnn.us/article/174250
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skinkestek
> The economist John Maynard Keynes identified Ramsey as a major talent when
> he was a mathematics student at Cambridge in the early 1920s. During his
> undergraduate days, Ramsey demolished Keynes’ theory of probability and...

> Keynes, in an impressive show of administrative skill and sleight of hand,
> made the 21-year-old Ramsey a fellow of King’s College at a time when only
> someone who had studied there could be a fellow. (Ramsey had done his degree
> at Trinity).

Wow, seriously, that's the way we ought to treat people who "demolish" our
ideas :-)

Edit: I should probably say that I have been trying to behave like this for a
few years already at my scale, my point is that this is inspiring.

Oh, and there exist people who are so toxic on top of being blunt that I
probably wouldn't work with them even if it gave me a 5% chance to make the
worlds first commercial viable fusion reactor.

~~~
eruditely
By the way, it's alleged by a famous professor(?) and amazon reviewer Michael
Emmet Brady that Ramsey in no way "demolished" his theory and that this
particular problem has drawn people away from respecting and appreciating
Keynes immense work in philosophy of probability

here is the review:
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2927587](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2927587)

"An Examination of the Fundamental Reasons Why Frank Ramsey Failed in His
Reviews of J M Keynes's a Treatise on Probability"

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wolfhumble
If you would like to know more about Frank Ramsey from the perspective of his
wife, brother, friends, coworkers and even himself, I found the BBC program
"Better than the Stars", from 1978, blissfully exciting.

You will hear what he thinks about Bertrand Russells remark on the small size
of men in relation to the universe, truth and probability, mountain walking
and even how many hours he worked every day +++! :-)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAeDc8UB2Gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAeDc8UB2Gs)

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chalst
> He had a profound influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein, persuading him to drop
> the quest for certainty, purity, and sparse metaphysical landscapes in the
> Tractatus and turn to ordinary language and human practices.

Interesting. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein
credits the Neo-Ricardian economist Pierro Sraffa with something like the same
influence. I'd be curious to know what led Misak to this conclusion.

~~~
Advokatus
Ramsey was the one who dug Wittgenstein up out of his self-imposed village
solitude and convinced him that the Tractatus was fatally flawed (he attacked
W’s treatment of the color exclusion problem), and remained a significant
influence on W. More so the Sraffa in real terms.

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eindiran
His proof of Ramsey's Theorem [0] is possibly my favorite proof of all time.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem)

~~~
bitL
It was pretty mind-blowing to realize during a discrete math class that chaos
is basically impossible. Then learning that Ramsey passed away very young felt
terrible.

~~~
wtallis
I'm not sure I'd interpret that result as "chaos is impossible". I'd rather
say that you can always find some apparent pattern (of smallish size) by
searching through enough randomness/chaos. That seems intuitively to be fairly
unsurprising considering everyday experiences like cloud gazing, or the
existence of conspiracy theorists. Whether the pattern you find has any
important meaning is an entirely different question.

~~~
eindiran
I think a reasonable interpretation of the result is the idea that all
"chaotic" graphs of sufficient size _must_ contain order, which isn't as
strong as "chaos is impossible", but isn't very intuitive to me.

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gwern
If you're interested in his papers, I spent some time putting them online:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_P._Ramsey#References](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_P._Ramsey#References)
\+
[https://old.reddit.com/r/DecisionTheory/comments/aj6v87/fran...](https://old.reddit.com/r/DecisionTheory/comments/aj6v87/frank_p_ramseys_papers/)

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justinjlynn
> It is hard to get our ordinary minds around the achievements of the great
> Cambridge mathematician, philosopher, and economist, Frank Ramsey.

How is anyone not immediately repelled by this style of writing? Seriously,
though.

~~~
mhh__
I find the whole Genius-fetish quite annoying - people who actually call
themselves geniuses tend to be more Tommy Wiseau than Tom Kibble

~~~
SteveSmith16384
Did he call himself a genius?

~~~
eruditely
I think my all reasonable estimates, he was a polymath, maybe not on the level
of Kolmogorov or something but it's the fact that he died so young, had such
immense influence, and worked in so many fields.

