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George Spencer-Brown is described in his vita {ref|vita} 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 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 became personally acquainted with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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 lecturerer in formal mathematics at the University of London, and joined the Cambridge University department of pure mathematics in 1969.

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 {ref|nature}, Spencer-Brown claimed a noncomputational proof of the four-colour theorem. Although his proof was not verified, applications of his work have been used in discussions of the theorem. {ref|color}

Apart from the non-numerical caluli he devised, Laws of Form, his chief mathematical interest has been the theory of numbers, and 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)

Selected works

• G. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (original German title: Gesetze der Form), Bohmeier Verlag

(1997) Lübeck, Germany

References

• {note|vita} Vita at lawsofform.org. Accessed on November 22, 2005
• {note|nature} G. Spence Brown, Claim of Proof to Four Color Theorem. Letter to the Editors of Nature. 17 December 1976.
• {note|color} Louis H. Kauffman, Reformulating the Map Color Theorem. on arvix.org server, updated 23 December 2001. Accessed on November 22, 2005
• lawsofform.org - a website devoted to his work. Includes an extensive bibliography of the secondary literature on Laws of Form.

• 1923 births
• 20th century mathematicians
• English mathematicians