PERSON
Alfred North Whitehead
British mathematician turned process philosopher (1861–1947) whose late-career metaphysics — built on actual occasions and concrescence rather than substances — turns out to be the most adequate framework available for thinking about AI.
Whitehead's career divided into two nearly unconnected halves. For four decades in England — at Trinity College Cambridge, University College London, and Imperial College — he was a distinguished mathematician, best known for co-authoring Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell (1910–1913). In 1924, at age sixty-three, he accepted a professorship in philosophy at Harvard and began a second career that would produce one of the most ambitious metaphysical systems of the twentieth century. The shift was abrupt and, at first, bewildering to his contemporaries. The system — elaborated in Science and the Modern World (1925) and Process and Reality (1929) — remains difficult, fertile, and increasingly relevant.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, in 1861, the son of a Church of England schoolmaster. He was educated at Sherborne School and Trinity College Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and stayed on as a Fellow. His early career was mathematical; he worked on universal algebra, the