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Revision as of 18:35, 26 November 2005 by 202.36.179.65 (talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)George Spencer-Brown is described in as a "mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, educational consultant and practitioner, consulting psychotherapist, author, and poet". He is best known for his 1969 book Laws of Form. The calculus presented in that book, known variously as the calculus of indications, primary algebra, and boundary algebra, has influenced, among others, Heinz von Foerster, Louis Kauffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Francisco Varela.
Born on April 2, 1923 in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England, Spencer-Brown obtained an M.B. in 1940 from London Hospital Medical College. After serving in the Royal Navy (1943-47), he studied at Trinity College Cambridge, earning Honours in Philosophy (1950) and Psychology (1951), and where he met Bertrand Russell.
From 1952 to 1958, he taught philosophy at Christ Church College, Oxford, earning M.A. degrees in 1954 from both Oxford and Cambridge, and writing his 1957 book Probability and Scientific Inference. During the 1960s, he became a disciple of the maverick British psychiatrist R. D. Laing, frequently cited in Laws of Form.
Laws of Form emerged out of work in electronic engineering Spencer-Brown did around 1960, and from lectures on mathematical logic he later gave under the auspices of the University of London's extension program.
In 1964, on Russell's recommendation, he became a lecturer in formal mathematics at the University of London. From 1969 onward he was a Member of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics of the University of Cambridge. In the 1970s and 1980s he was visiting professor at the University of Western Australia, Stanford University and at the University of Maryland, College Park. In a 1976 letter to the Editor of Nature, Spencer-Brown claimed a noncomputational proof of the four-colour theorem. Although his proof is unverified to date, applications of his work have appeared in published discussion of the theorem.
Apart from Laws of Form, his chief mathematical interest has been the theory of numbers, in particular the determination of primality.
Quote: "...to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bounds imposed by one's own ignorance." Laws of Form, Appendix 1.
Work cited
- G. Spencer-Brown, 1997. Laws of Form (original German title: Gesetze der Form). Lübeck: Bohmeier Verlag.
- G. Spencer-Brown, Claim of Proof to Four Color Theorem. Letter to the Editors of Nature. 17 December 1976.
Other references
- Vita of G. Spencer-Brown
- Kauffman, L. H., "Reformulating the Map Color Theorem"
- lawsofform.org - a website devoted to his work. Includes an extensive bibliography of the secondary literature on Laws of Form.