Philip Jourdain

Philip Edward Bertrand Jourdain ( born October 16, 1879 in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, † October 1, 1919 in Crookham, Hampshire ) was an English mathematician.

Jourdain was the son of a country parson, and visited in 1898 after leaving school in Cheltenham, the University of Cambridge. Even in his youth he was hampered by a severe, slowly progressive nervous disease ( Friedreich's ataxia ), which also affected his studies and where he eventually died. He visited logic courses at Bertrand Russell, who influenced him greatly. In a series of papers 1906-1913 he studied with Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers and formulated a series of paradoxes. A version of the liar paradox ( the paradox maps ) is named after him, is on a map, the sentence on the back of the card 's true - there is but: The sentence on the other side is wrong. He also published a number of essays on the foundations of mechanics and their variational principles, the basics of probability theory ( published in Mind ), the application of logic in physics and the history of mathematics, where he benefited from his knowledge of foreign languages ​​. He was considered an expert on Isaac Newton and was planning a new edition of his works. Jourdain was editor of the philosophical journal The Monist and the International of Ethics. From 1913 he was European editor of the Open Court Publishing Company. In 1915 he married.

The principle of virtual power in mechanics is named after him.