The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead studied mathematics at Cambridge University and stayed on there as a lecturer for 30 years before moving to Imperial College, University of London, where he was a professor of applied mathematics for 10 years. During this time, Whitehead was involved in a wide range of fields, including philosophy, producing such a bountiful harvest of work that he was immediately hired as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University upon his retirement and began another distinguished academic career, which he did not leave until he was 76 years old. He died 10 years later in Boston. His early magnum opus is Principia Mathematica, which he wrote in collaboration with his younger colleague and former student Bertrand Russell and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913; the masterpiece of his later career is Science and the Modern World, published in 1925. In this nearly all-encompassing treatise on natural philosophy, Whitehead referred to the seventeenth century as “the century of genius,” which title he also gave to its third chapter.