Misplaced Pages

#477522

71-710: Mathematical Reviews was founded by Otto E. Neugebauer in 1940 as an alternative to the German journal Zentralblatt für Mathematik , which Neugebauer had also founded a decade earlier, but which under the Nazis had begun censoring reviews by and of Jewish mathematicians. The goal of the new journal was to give reviews of every mathematical research publication. As of November 2007, the Mathematical Reviews database contained information on over 2.2 million articles. The authors of reviews are volunteers, usually chosen by

142-481: A "reproductive" rather than a "productive" thinker, he attributed this to his Jewish sense of identity. He wrote: 'The saint is the only Jewish "genius". Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance).' There is much discussion around the extent to which Wittgenstein and his siblings, who were of 3/4 Jewish descent, saw themselves as Jews. The issue has arisen in particular regarding Wittgenstein's schooldays, because Adolf Hitler was, for

213-497: A decree that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable family surname, so Meier's son, also Moses, took the name of his employers, the Sayn-Wittgensteins , and became Moses Meier Wittgenstein. His son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein — who took the middle name "Christian" to distance himself from his Jewish background — married Fanny Figdor, also Jewish, who converted to Protestantism just before they married, and

284-412: A five-year period, and dividing this total by the total number of papers published by the journal during that five-year period. For the period 2012 – 2014, the top five journals in Mathematical Reviews by MCQ were: The "All Journal MCQ" is computed by considering all the journals indexed by Mathematical Reviews as a single meta-journal, which makes it possible to determine if a particular journal has

355-566: A fortune from his father in 1913. Before World War I, he "made a very generous financial bequest to a group of poets and artists chosen by Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of Der Brenner , from artists in need. These included Trakl as well as Rainer Maria Rilke and the architect Adolf Loos ." Later, in a period of severe personal depression after World War I, he gave away his remaining fortune to his brothers and sisters. Three of his four older brothers died by separate acts of suicide. Wittgenstein left academia several times: serving as an officer on

426-499: A fourth daughter Dora who died as a baby; and five boys: Johannes (Hans), Kurt, Rudolf (Rudi), Paul – who became a concert pianist despite losing an arm in World War I – and Ludwig, who was the youngest of the family. The children were baptized as Catholics, received formal Catholic instruction, and were raised in an exceptionally intense environment. The family was at the centre of Vienna's cultural life; Bruno Walter described

497-422: A higher or lower MCQ than average. The 2018 All Journal MCQ is 0.41. Current Mathematical Publications was a subject index in print format that published the newest and upcoming mathematical literature, chosen and indexed by Mathematical Reviews editors. It covered the period from 1965 until 2012, when it was discontinued. Otto E. Neugebauer Otto Eduard Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 – February 19, 1990)

568-711: A hospital laboratory technician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne . According to a family tree prepared in Jerusalem after World War II, Wittgenstein's paternal great-great-grandfather was Moses Meier, an Ashkenazi Jewish land agent who lived with his wife, Brendel Simon, in Bad Laasphe in the Principality of Wittgenstein , Westphalia . In July 1808, Napoleon issued

639-475: A letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says that he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God's will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God's will. In Culture and Value , Wittgenstein writes: Is what I am doing [my work in philosophy] really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. His close friend Norman Malcolm wrote: Wittgenstein's mature life

710-550: A religious point of view." Wittgenstein referred to Augustine of Hippo in his Philosophical Investigations . Philosophically, Wittgenstein's thought shows alignment with religious discourse. For example, he would become one of the century's fiercest critics of scientism . Wittgenstein's religious belief emerged during his service for the Austrian army in World War I, and he was a devoted reader of Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's religious writings. He viewed his wartime experiences as

781-412: A sincere and devoted sympathy, changed over time, much like his philosophical ideas. In 1912, Wittgenstein wrote to Russell saying that Mozart and Beethoven were the actual sons of God. However, Wittgenstein resisted formal religion, saying it was hard for him to "bend the knee", though his grandfather's beliefs continued to influence Wittgenstein – as he said, "I cannot help seeing every problem from

SECTION 10

#1732757528478

852-500: A story about Paul practising on one of the pianos in the Wittgensteins' main family mansion, when he suddenly shouted at Ludwig in the next room: I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door! The family palace housed seven grand pianos and each of the siblings pursued music "with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on the pathological". The eldest brother, Hans,

923-870: A student at the Realschule , Wittgenstein was influenced by Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger 's 1903 book Geschlecht und Charakter ( Sex and Character ). Weininger (1880–1903), who was Jewish, argued that the concepts of male and female exist only as Platonic forms , and that Jews tend to embody the Platonic femininity. Whereas men are basically rational, women operate only at the level of their emotions and sexual organs. Jews, Weininger argued, are similar, saturated with femininity, with no sense of right and wrong, and no soul. Weininger argues that man must choose between his masculine and feminine sides, consciousness and unconsciousness, platonic love and sexuality. Love and sexual desire stand in contradiction, and love between

994-455: A top mark (5) in religious studies; a 2 for conduct and English, 3 for French, geography, history, mathematics and physics, and 4 for German, chemistry, geometry and freehand drawing. He had particular difficulty with spelling and failed his written German exam because of it. He wrote in 1931: My bad spelling in youth, up to the age of about 18 or 19, is connected with the whole of the rest of my character (my weakness in study). Wittgenstein

1065-417: A trial in which he strove to conform to the will of God, and in a journal entry from 29 April 1915, he writes: Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. I am a worm, but through God I become a man. God be with me. Amen. Around this time, Wittgenstein wrote that "Christianity is indeed the only sure way to happiness", but he rejected the idea that religious belief

1136-491: A while, at the same school at the same time. Laurence Goldstein argues that it is "overwhelmingly probable" that the boys met each other and that Hitler would have disliked Wittgenstein, a "stammering, precocious, precious, aristocratic upstart ..."; Strathern flatly states they never met. Other commentators have dismissed as irresponsible and uninformed any suggestion that Wittgenstein's wealth and unusual personality might have fed Hitler's antisemitism, in part because there

1207-627: A woman and a man is therefore doomed to misery or immorality. The only life worth living is the spiritual one – to live as a woman or a Jew means one has no right to live at all; the choice is genius or death. Weininger committed suicide, shooting himself in 1903, shortly after publishing the book. Wittgenstein, then 14, attended Weininger's funeral. Many years later, as a professor at the University of Cambridge , Wittgenstein distributed copies of Weininger's book to his bemused academic colleagues. He said that Weininger's arguments were wrong, but that it

1278-443: A year. Historian Brigitte Hamann writes that he stood out from the other boys: he spoke an unusually pure form of High German with a stutter, dressed elegantly, and was sensitive and unsociable. Monk writes that the other boys made fun of him, singing after him: "Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts" ("Wittgenstein wanders wistfully Vienna-wards (in) worsening winds"). In his leaving certificate, he received

1349-597: Is no evidence they had anything to do with each other. Several commentators have argued that a school photograph of Hitler may show Wittgenstein in the lower left corner, While Wittgenstein would later claim that "[m]y thoughts are 100% Hebraic", as Hans Sluga has argued, if so, His was a self-doubting Judaism, which had always the possibility of collapsing into a destructive self-hatred (as it did in Weininger's case) but which also held an immense promise of innovation and genius. By Hebraic, he meant to include

1420-418: Is no indication that Hitler would have seen Wittgenstein as Jewish. Wittgenstein and Hitler were born just six days apart, though Hitler had to re-sit his mathematics exam before being allowed into a higher class, while Wittgenstein was moved forward by one, so they ended up two grades apart at the Realschule . Monk estimates that they were both at the school during the 1904–1905 school year, but says there

1491-518: The Berlin Academy , the third eldest brother, Rudi, committed suicide in a Berlin bar. He had asked the pianist to play Thomas Koschat 's " Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich " ("Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I"), before mixing himself a drink of milk and potassium cyanide . He had left several suicide notes, one to his parents that said he was grieving over the death of a friend, and another that referred to his "perverted disposition". It

SECTION 20

#1732757528478

1562-628: The Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy , standing out as "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations". His philosophy is often divided into an early period, exemplified by the Tractatus , and a later period, articulated primarily in the Philosophical Investigations . The "early Wittgenstein"

1633-1019: The Islamic world , and Europe of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance . The noted physicist and astronomer Gerry Neugebauer at Caltech was his son. In 1936, he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo. This was about pre-Greek mathematics and its position relative to the Greek. Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( / ˈ v ɪ t ɡ ən ʃ t aɪ n , - s t aɪ n / VIT -gən-s(h)tyne , Austrian German: [ˈluːdvɪk ˈjoːsɛf ˈjoːhan ˈvɪtɡn̩ʃtaɪn] ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951)

1704-501: The Royal Meteorological Society researched and investigated the ionization of the upper atmosphere, by suspending instruments on balloons or kites. At Glossop, Wittgenstein worked under Professor of Physics Sir Arthur Schuster . He also worked on the design of a propeller with small jet ( Tip jet ) engines on the end of its blades, something he patented in 1911, and that earned him a research studentship from

1775-582: The University of Graz in electrical engineering and physics and in 1921 he transferred to the University of Munich . From 1922 to 1924, he studied mathematics at the University of Göttingen under Richard Courant , Edmund Landau , and Emmy Noether . During 1924–1925, he was at the University of Copenhagen , where his interests changed to the history of Egyptian mathematics. He returned to Göttingen and remained there until 1933. His thesis Die Grundlagen der ägyptischen Bruchrechnung ("The Fundamentals of Egyptian Calculation with Fractions") (Springer, 1926)

1846-672: The Balzan General Prize Committee). Neugebauer donated the prize money of 250,000 Swiss francs to the Institute for Advanced Study. Neugebauer began his career as a mathematician, then turned to Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics , and then took up the history of mathematical astronomy. In a career which spanned sixty-five years, he largely created modern understanding of mathematical astronomy in Babylon and Egypt , through Greco-Roman antiquity, to India ,

1917-621: The Christian tradition, in contradistinction to the Greek tradition, holding that good and evil could not be reconciled. He began his studies in mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule Berlin in Charlottenburg , Berlin, on 23 October 1906, lodging with the family of Professor Jolles. He attended for three semesters, and was awarded a diploma ( Abgangzeugnis ) on 5 May 1908. During his time at

1988-522: The Christians to prevent Easter from ever coinciding with Passover . The ecclesiastical calendar, considered by church historians to be highly scientific and deeply complex, turned out to be quite simple. In 1988, by studying a scrap of Greek papyrus , Neugebauer discovered the most important single piece of evidence to date for the extensive transmission of Babylonian astronomy to the Greeks and for

2059-558: The Institute, Wittgenstein developed an interest in aeronautics . He arrived at the Victoria University of Manchester in the spring of 1908 to study for a doctorate, full of plans for aeronautical projects, including designing and flying his own plane. He conducted research into the behaviour of kites in the upper atmosphere, experimenting at a meteorological observation site near Glossop in Derbyshire . Specifically,

2130-477: The Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . His only other published works were an article, " Some Remarks on Logical Form " (1929); a book review; and a children's dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations . A 1999 survey among American university and college teachers ranked

2201-532: The Reviews. Originally the reviews were written in several languages, but later an "English only" policy was introduced. Selected reviews (called "featured reviews") were also published as a book by the AMS, but this program has been discontinued. In 1980, all the contents of Mathematical Reviews since 1940 were integrated into an electronic searchable database. Eventually the contents became part of MathSciNet , which

Mathematical Reviews - Misplaced Pages Continue

2272-583: The US, the family was to an extent shielded from the hyperinflation that hit Austria in 1922 . However, their wealth diminished due to post-1918 hyperinflation and subsequently during the Great Depression , although even as late as 1938 they owned 13 mansions in Vienna alone. Wittgenstein was ethnically Jewish . His mother was Leopoldine Maria Josefa Kalmus, known among friends as "Poldi". Her father

2343-683: The Wittgensteins became the second wealthiest family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire , only the Rothschilds being wealthier. Karl Wittgenstein was viewed as the Austrian equivalent of Andrew Carnegie , with whom he was friends, and was one of the wealthiest men in the world by the 1890s. As a result of his decision in 1898 to invest substantially in the Netherlands and in Switzerland as well as overseas, particularly in

2414-524: The Wittgensteins considered themselves Jewish. This was evident during the Nazi era, when Ludwig's sister was assured by an official that they wouldn't be considered as Jews under the racial laws. Indignant at the state's attempt to dictate her identity, she demanded papers certifying their Jewish lineage. In his own writings, Wittgenstein frequently referred to himself as Jewish, often in a self-deprecating manner. For instance, while criticizing himself for being

2485-460: The centrifugal force exerted by the revolving arms and ignited. Propellers of the time were typically wood, whereas modern blades are made from pressed steel laminates as separate halves, which are then welded together. This gives the blade a hollow interior and thereby creates an ideal pathway for the air and gas. Work on the jet-powered propeller proved frustrating for Wittgenstein, who had very little experience working with machinery. Jim Bamber,

2556-530: The continuing use of Babylonian methods for 400 years even after Ptolemy wrote the Almagest . His last paper, "From Assyriology to Renaissance Art", published in 1989, detailed the history of a single astronomical parameter, the mean length of the synodic month, from cuneiform tablets, to the papyrus fragment just mentioned, to the Jewish calendar, to an early 15th-century book of hours . In 1986, Neugebauer

2627-525: The couple founded a successful business trading in wool in Leipzig . Ludwig's grandmother Fanny was a first cousin of the violinist Joseph Joachim . They had 11 children – among them Wittgenstein's father. Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein (1847–1913) became an industrial tycoon, and by the late 1880s was one of the richest men in Europe, with an effective monopoly on Austria's steel cartel. Thanks to Karl,

2698-542: The editors because of some expertise in the area of the article. It and Zentralblatt für Mathematik are the only comprehensive resources of this type. (The Mathematics section of Referativny Zhurnal is available only in Russian and is smaller in scale and difficult to access.) Often reviews give detailed summaries of the contents of the paper, sometimes with critical comments by the reviewer and references to related work. However, reviewers are not encouraged to criticize

2769-410: The end of World War I, when the Austrian troops he was commanding refused to obey his orders and deserted en masse . According to Gottlieb, Hermine had said Kurt seemed to carry "the germ of disgust for life within himself". Later, Ludwig wrote: I ought to have ... become a star in the sky. Instead of which I have remained stuck on earth. Wittgenstein was taught by private tutors at home until he

2840-520: The exam for the more technically oriented k.u.k. Realschule in Linz , a small state school with 300 pupils. In 1903, when he was 14, he began his three years of formal schooling there, lodging nearby during the term with the family of Josef Strigl, a teacher at the local gymnasium, the family giving him the nickname Luki. On starting at the Realschule, Wittgenstein had been moved forward

2911-573: The family's numerous music rooms. Wittgenstein, who valued precision and discipline, never considered contemporary classical music acceptable. He said to his friend Drury in 1930: Music came to a full stop with Brahms ; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the noise of machinery. Ludwig Wittgenstein himself had absolute pitch , and his devotion to music remained vitally important to him throughout his life; he made frequent use of musical examples and metaphors in his philosophical writings, and he

Mathematical Reviews - Misplaced Pages Continue

2982-472: The five brothers later committed suicide. Psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald argues that Karl was a harsh perfectionist who lacked empathy, and that Wittgenstein's mother was anxious and insecure, unable to stand up to her husband. Johannes Brahms said of the family, whom he visited regularly: They seemed to act towards one another as if they were at court. The family appeared to have a strong streak of depression running through it. Anthony Gottlieb tells

3053-516: The front line during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages, where he encountered controversy for using sometimes violent corporal punishment on both girls and boys (see, for example, the Haidbauer incident ), especially during mathematics classes; working during World War II as a hospital porter in London; and working as

3124-518: The greatness lies in that with which we disagree. It is his enormous mistake which is great. I.e. roughly speaking if you just add a "~" to the whole book it says an important truth. In an unusual move, Wittgenstein took out a copy of Weininger's work on 1 June 1931 from the Special Order Books in the university library. He met Moore on 2 June, when he probably gave this copy to Moore. Despite their and their forebears' Christianization,

3195-702: The history of the exact sciences, perhaps of the history of science , of our age." Neugebauer was born in Innsbruck , Austria . His father Rudolph Neugebauer was a railroad construction engineer and a collector and scholar of Oriental carpets. His parents died when he was quite young. During World War I , Neugebauer enlisted in the Austrian Army and served as an artillery lieutenant on the Italian front and then in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp alongside fellow countryman Ludwig Wittgenstein . In 1919, he entered

3266-680: The history of the mathematical sciences, in which he published extended papers on Egyptian computational techniques in arithmetic and geometry, including the Moscow Papyrus , the most important text for geometry. Neugebauer had worked on the Moscow Papyrus in Leningrad in 1928. In 1931, he founded the review journal Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete (Zbl), his most important contribution to modern mathematics. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Neugebauer

3337-466: The importance of the idea of confession . He wrote in his diaries about having made a major confession to his oldest sister, Hermine, while he was at the Realschule ; Monk speculates that it may have been about his loss of faith. He also discussed it with Gretl, his other sister, who directed him to Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation . As a teenager, Wittgenstein adopted Schopenhauer's epistemological idealism . However, after he studied

3408-479: The life at the Wittgensteins' palace as an "all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture." Karl was a leading patron of the arts, commissioning works by Auguste Rodin and financing the city's exhibition hall and art gallery, the Secession Building . Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of Wittgenstein's sister Margaret for her wedding, and Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in

3479-608: The mathematics department at Brown University , and founded Mathematical Reviews . He became an American citizen and remained at Brown for most of his career, founding the History of Mathematics Department there in 1947 and becoming University Professor. Jointly with the American Assyriologist Abraham Sachs , he published Mathematical Cuneiform Texts in 1945, which has remained a standard English-language work on Babylonian mathematics. In 1967, he

3550-406: The paper, because the author does not have an opportunity to respond. The author's summary may be quoted when it is not possible to give an independent review, or when the summary is deemed adequate by the reviewer or the editors. Only bibliographic information may be given when a work is in an unusual language, when it is a brief paper in a conference volume, or when it is outside the primary scope of

3621-431: The philosophy of mathematics, he abandoned epistemological idealism for Gottlob Frege 's conceptual realism . In later years, Wittgenstein was highly dismissive of Schopenhauer, describing him as an ultimately "shallow" thinker: Schopenhauer is quite a crude mind ... Where real depth starts, his comes to an end. Wittgenstein's relationship with Christianity and with religion in general, for which he always professed

SECTION 50

#1732757528478

3692-433: The university in the autumn of 1908. At the time, contemporary propeller designs were not advanced enough to actually put Wittgenstein's ideas into practice, and it would be years before a blade design that could support Wittgenstein's innovative design was created. Wittgenstein's design required air and gas to be forced along the propeller arms to combustion chambers on the end of each blade, where they were then compressed by

3763-477: Was 14 years old. Subsequently, for three years, he attended a school. After the deaths of Hans and Rudi, Karl relented and allowed Paul and Ludwig to be sent to school. Waugh writes that it was too late for Wittgenstein to pass his exams for the more academic Gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt; having had no formal schooling, he failed his entrance exam and only barely managed after extra tutoring to pass

3834-570: Was a Bohemian Jew, and her mother was an Austrian- Slovene Catholic – she was Wittgenstein's only non-Jewish grandparent. Poldi was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich Hayek on his maternal side. Wittgenstein was born at 8:30  PM on 26 April 1889 in the "Villa Wittgenstein" at what is today Neuwaldegger Straße 38 in the suburban parish Neuwaldegg  [ de ] next to Vienna. Karl and Poldi had nine children in all – four girls: Hermine, Margaret (Gretl), Helene, and

3905-735: Was a colossal work, in size, detail, and depth, and its contents showed that Babylonian mathematics far surpassed anything one could imagine from a knowledge of Egyptian and Greek mathematics . He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1928 in Bologna and a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1936 in Oslo. In 1939, after the Zentralblatt was taken over by the Nazis , he moved to the United States, joined

3976-477: Was a mathematical analysis of the table in the Rhind Papyrus . In 1927, he received his venia legendi for the history of mathematics and served as Privatdozent . In 1927, his first paper on Babylonian mathematics was an account of the origin of the sexagesimal system. In 1929, Neugebauer founded Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik (QS), a Springer series devoted to

4047-603: Was also interested in chronology . He was able to reconstruct the Alexandrian Christian calendar and its origin from the Alexandrian Jewish calendar as of about the 4th century, at least 200 years prior to any other source for either calendar. Thus, the Jewish calendar was derived by combining the 19-year cycle using the Alexandrian year with the seven-day week, and was then slightly modified by

4118-481: Was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic , the philosophy of mathematics , the philosophy of mind , and the philosophy of language . From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge . Despite his position, only one book of his philosophy was published during his entire life: the 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung ( Logical-Philosophical Treatise , 1921), which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under

4189-543: Was an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science who became known for his research on the history of astronomy and the other exact sciences as they were practiced in antiquity and the Middle Ages . By studying clay tablets , he discovered that the ancient Babylonians knew much more about mathematics and astronomy than had been previously realized. The National Academy of Sciences has called Neugebauer "the most original and productive scholar of

4260-416: Was asked to sign an oath of loyalty to the new German government, but he refused and was promptly suspended from employment. In 1934, he joined the University of Copenhagen as a full professor of mathematics. In 1936, he published a paper on the method of dating and analyzing texts using diophantine equations . During 1935–1937, he published a corpus of texts named Mathematische Keilschrift-Texte (MKT). MKT

4331-492: Was awarded the Balzan Prize "for his fundamental research into the exact sciences in the ancient world, in particular, on ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek astronomy , which has put our understanding of ancient science on a new footing and illuminated its transmission to the classical and medieval worlds. For his outstanding success in promoting interest and further research in the history of science" (Motivation of

SECTION 60

#1732757528478

4402-877: Was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship by the American Astronomical Society . In 1977, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences , and in 1979, he received the Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America . In 1984, he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he had been a member since 1950. Neugebauer

4473-620: Was baptized as an infant by a Catholic priest and received formal instruction in Catholic doctrine as a child, as was common at the time. In an interview, his sister Gretl Stonborough-Wittgenstein says that their grandfather's "strong, severe, partly ascetic Christianity " was a strong influence on all the Wittgenstein children. While he was at the Realschule , he decided he lacked religious faith and began reading Arthur Schopenhauer per Gretl's recommendation. He nevertheless believed in

4544-469: Was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world, and he believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship, he had solved all philosophical problems. The "later Wittgenstein", however, rejected many of the assumptions of the Tractatus , arguing that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given language game . Born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, he inherited

4615-679: Was hailed as a musical prodigy. At the age of four, writes Alexander Waugh , Hans could identify the Doppler effect in a passing siren as a quarter-tone drop in pitch, and at five started crying "Wrong! Wrong!" when two brass bands in a carnival played the same tune in different keys . But he died in mysterious circumstances in May 1902, when he ran away to the US and disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay , most likely having committed suicide. Two years later, aged 22 and studying chemistry at

4686-493: Was merely thinking that a certain doctrine was true. From this time on, Wittgenstein viewed religious faith as a way of living and opposed rational argumentation or proofs for God. With age, a deepening personal spirituality led to several elucidations and clarifications, as he untangled language problems in religion—attacking, for example, the temptation to think of God's existence as a matter of scientific evidence. In 1947, finding it more difficult to work, he wrote: I have had

4757-460: Was officially launched in 1996. MathSciNet also has extensive citation information. Mathematical Reviews computes a mathematical citation quotient ( MCQ ) for each journal. Like the impact factor and other similar citation rates , this is a numerical statistic that measures the frequency of citations to a journal. The MCQ is calculated by counting the total number of citations into the journal that have been indexed by Mathematical Reviews over

4828-685: Was reported at the time that he had sought advice from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee , an organization that was campaigning against Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibited homosexual sex. Ludwig himself was a closeted homosexual, who separated sexual intercourse from love, despising all forms of the former. His father forbade the family from ever mentioning his name again. The second eldest brother, Kurt, an officer and company director, shot himself on 27 October 1918 just before

4899-433: Was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers. Toward the end, Wittgenstein wrote: Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein , 'To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.' That is what I would have liked to say about my work. While

4970-461: Was the way they were wrong that was interesting. In a letter dated 23 August 1931, Wittgenstein wrote the following to G. E. Moore : Dear Moore, Thanks for your letter. I can quite imagine that you don't admire Weininger very much, what with that beastly translation and the fact that W. must feel very foreign to you. It is true that he is fantastic but he is great and fantastic. It isn't necessary or rather not possible to agree with him but

5041-714: Was unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages. He also learnt to play the clarinet in his 30s. A fragment of music (three bars), composed by Wittgenstein, was discovered in one of his 1931 notebooks, by Michael Nedo , director of the Wittgenstein Institute in Cambridge. Ray Monk writes that Karl's aim was to turn his sons into captains of industry; they were not sent to school lest they acquire bad habits but were educated at home to prepare them for work in Karl's industrial empire. Three of

#477522