Guinness, Sir Alec, 1914-2000, English actor, b. London. After his stage debut in 1934, Guinness performed with John Gielgud's company and at the Old Vic. An actor of enormous versatility and range on stage and in film, he was especially noted for his minimalist approach and his finely tuned interpretations of character. One of his earliest and most acclaimed stage performances was his modern-dress Hamlet (1938). Guinness's gifts for mimicry and characterization delighted audiences in such film comedies as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), in which he performed 10 roles; The Lavender Hill Mob (1951); The Ladykillers (1955); and The Horse's Mouth (1958). Among the many dramatic films in which he appeared are The Prisoner (1955); The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for which he won an Academy Award; Tunes of Glory (1960); and Star Wars (1977). On television he won acclaim for his portrayal of George Smiley, John le Carré's counterintelligence agent, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979) and Smiley's People (1982).

(born April 2, 1914, London, Eng.—died Aug. 5, 2000, Midhurst, West Sussex) British actor. He made his stage debut in 1934. His reputation soared after 1936, when he joined the Old Vic company and starred in plays by William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and Anton Chekhov. A versatile actor, he won the praise of New York critics and audiences in Shakespearean roles and in T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1946). His many films include comedies such as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Captain's Paradise (1953), and Our Man in Havana (1959) as well as dramas such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, Academy Award) and Tunes of Glory (1960). He won a new generation of fans in three Star Wars films (1977, 1980, 1983).

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Ivor Grattan-Guinness (Born 23 June 1941, Bakewell, England) is a historian of mathematics and logic.

He spent much of his career at Middlesex University Business School. He has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and is a member of the Academie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences.

The work of Grattan-Guinness touches on all historical periods, but he is particularly interested in Euclid, and in the rise of functional analysis and mathematical logic. He has been especially interested in characterising how past thinkers far removed from us in time view their findings differently from the way we see them now, and has emphasised the importance of ignorance in this task. He has done extensive research with original sources, thanks to his reading knowledge of the main European languages.

Grattan-Guinness (2000) is a sweeping study of the rise of mathematical logic during the critical period 1870-1940. The central theme of the book is the rise of logicism, thanks to the efforts of Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Whitehead, and its demise due to Gödel and indifference. Whole chapters are devoted to the emergence of algebraic logic in the 19th century UK, Cantor and the emergence of set theory, the emergence of mathematical logic in Germany told in a way that downplays Frege's importance, and to Peano and his followers. There follow four chapters devoted to the ideas of the young Bertrand Russell, the writing of Principia Mathematica, and to the mixed reception its ideas and methods encountered over the period 1910-40. The book touches on the rise of model theory as well as proof theory, and on the emergence of American research on the foundation of mathematics, especially in the hands of Eliakim Hastings Moore and his students, of the postulate theorists, and of Quine. While Polish logic is often mentioned, it is not covered systematically. Finally, the book is a contribution to the history of philosophy as well as of mathematics..

Selected publications

Books written

• 1970. The Development of the Foundations of Mathematical Analysis from Euler to Riemann. MIT Press (1970).
• 1980. From the Calculus to Set Theory, 1630-1910: An Introductory History. Duckworth (1980).
• 1997. The Rainbow of Mathematics: A History of the Mathematical Sciences. Fontana (1997) ISBN 978-000-686179-9 (pbk). W. W. Norton and Company (1999) ISBN 978-0393-04650-2 (hbk) ISBN 0-393-32030-8 (pbk).
• 2000. From the Calculus to Set Theory 1630-1910: An Introductory History. Princeton Univ. Press. ISBN 0-691-07082-2.
• 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940: Logics, Set Theories, and the Foundations of Mathematics from Cantor through Russell to Gödel. Princeton Univ. Press. ISBN 0-691-05858-X. Enormous bibliography.

Books edited

• 2003. Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences, 2 vols. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. ISBN 0801873967
• 2005. Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics. Elsevier.

Articles

• 2002. "A Sideways Look at Hilbert's Twenty-Three Problems of 1900," Notices of the American Mathematical Society 47: 752-57.

External links

• Academic home page.
• Encomium at Mathematical Sciences Foundation