How long does it take to read Principia Mathematica?
Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell
Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell takes about 7 hours 31 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 31 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1910. 410 pages, about 112,750 words.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 32 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 31 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 42 minutes |
The page count is the median across 20 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Principia Mathematica has been described as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of human history. It attempts to rigorously reduce mathematics to logic. Among other things, it defines the concept of number. It is obviously a very dense and abstract work which has been made all the more difficult to read in light of more recent developments in the symbolic representation of logical concepts. It would be helpful in any new edition of the book to provide a summary of the reactions to and developments of the ideas in the work, a list of corrections, a bibliography, and a table of equivalent current logical symbols.
Subjects: Mathematics, Philosophy, Symbolic and mathematical Logic, Philosophy of Mathematics, Number theory, Logic, symbolic and mathematical
