Life
Spencer-Brown passed the First M.B. in 1940 at London Hospital Medical College (now part of Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry). 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 met Bertrand Russell. From 1952 to 1958, he taught philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford, taking 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 innovative Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, frequently cited in Laws of Form. In 1964, on Bertrand Russell's recommendation, he became a lecturer in formal mathematics at the University of London. From 1969 onward, he was affiliated with the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at 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.
During his time at Cambridge Spencer-Brown was a chess half-blue. He held two world records as a glider pilot, and was a sports correspondent to the Daily Express. He has also written some novels and poems, sometimes employing the pen name James Keys.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And he thought to himself...., ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 12:17-20.
“I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.”
—Fidel Castro (b. 1926)