Frank P. Ramsey - Life

Life

He was born on 22 February 1903 in Cambridge where his father Arthur Stanley (1867 - 1954), also a mathematician, was President of Magdalene College. His mother was Mary Agnes Stanley (1875 - 1927). He was the eldest of two brothers and two sisters, and his brother Michael Ramsey, the only one of the four siblings who was to remain Christian, later became Archbishop of Canterbury. He entered Winchester College in 1915 and later returned to Cambridge to study mathematics at Trinity College. Easy-going, simple and modest, Ramsey had many interests besides his scientific work. Even as a teenager Ramsey exhibited both a profound ability and, as attested by his brother, an extremely diverse range of interests:

He was interested in almost everything. He was immensely widely read in English literature; he was enjoying classics though he was on the verge of plunging into being a mathematical specialist; he was very interested in politics, and well-informed; he had got a political concern and a sort of left-wing caring-for-the-underdog kind of outlook about politics.

— Michael Ramsey, Quoted in Mellor

Ramsey suffered mildly from depression, and was intellectually interested in psychoanalysis. While writing his dissertation he went to Vienna to be psychoanalysed by Theodor Reik, a disciple of Freud. As one of the justifications for undertaking therapy, he asserted in a letter to his mother that unconscious impulses might even affect the work of a mathematician. In September 1925 he married Lettice Baker, the wedding taking place in a Register Office since Ramsey was, as his wife described him, a ‘militant atheist’. (She subsequently ran a photography practice in Cambridge for many years ("Ramsey and Muspratt").) The marriage produced two daughters. Despite his atheism, Ramsey was quite tolerant towards his brother when the latter decided to become a priest in the Church of England.