I’ve spent a very interesting day talking to economists and others in Oxford today, a holiday as far as I’m concerned after a solid stretch of meetings, and revising the draft of my next book. The sun shone, after a few days so bitterly cold that the chill gets into the gaps between your bones. I spotted – for the first time in all the years I’ve been visiting/living there since my big brother was a student in the late 1960s – this chap:

Pan

On the train to and fro I read a short e-book, [amazon_link id=”B00BBJCUUW” target=”_blank” ]Shooting Star: The Brief and Brilliant Life of Frank Ramsey[/amazon_link] by Karl Sabbagh. It’s an absorbing biography of somebody I knew only because his name is attached to optimal taxation theory. He was evidently an extraordinary characted, who led a colourful life on the edge of the Bloomsbury Group, made profound contributions to mathematics and philosophy as well as, en passant, to economics, and translated Wittgenstein – correcting errors – in his spare time as an undergraduate student. He died at only 26, perhaps due to medical error.

The most telling paragraph describes his first two published papers:

“With ‘Universals’ and ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’, Ramsey had established a pattern of reasonably short, down-to-earth, clearly-written papers which said something fundamentally new. He had written only 16 such papers by the time he died, and each had ideas that were to resonate for the next 80 years.”

Only?!

If you know nothing much about Ramsey either, this book is well worth taking on a train or plane ride.

[amazon_image id=”B00BBJCUUW” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Shooting Star (Kindle Single)[/amazon_image]