Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher, born at Ramsgate in Kent and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he taught mathematics for some twenty-five years. With his former student Bertrand Russell he wrote Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), an attempt to derive mathematics from logic. He later taught at University College London and Imperial College, and in 1924 moved to Harvard, where he turned to philosophy and wrote Science and the Modern World (1925) and Process and Reality (1929). His essays on teaching were collected as The Aims of Education (1929).
An Introduction to Mathematics is a short book written for general readers in the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, a popular series of compact introductions published in London by Williams and Norgate and in New York by Henry Holt in 1911. Whitehead wrote it just after the first volume of Principia Mathematica, and it was his first book for a wide public.
