Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889, the youngest son of one of the richest steel magnates in Europe; musicians such as Brahms and Mahler visited the family home, and three of his brothers took their own lives. He first studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester, working on aircraft propellers, then became interested in the foundations of mathematics and went to Cambridge to study logic under Russell, who soon thought the pupil abler than himself. In the First World War he volunteered for the Austrian army and finished the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus at the front and in a prisoner-of-war camp. Believing the book had solved all the problems of philosophy, he gave his whole vast inheritance to his brothers and sisters, became a village schoolteacher in rural Austria, worked as a monastery gardener and designed a house for his sister. At forty he returned to Cambridge and later became professor of philosophy; his later thought differed sharply from his early work. His last words were: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life.'