Diderot and Bertrand Russell, two famous earlier non-believers, would also have been puzzled by what has happened to God at the hands of the western intelligentsia.

ECONOMIST: Religion and science

" In his popular essay, "In Praise of Idleness, " the 20th century philosopher, Bertrand Russell, lamented modern man's loss of his capacity for play, seeing it as having been erased by the "cult of efficiency.

CNN: Dancing into old age

He did produce an acute monograph on the early technical work of Bertrand Russell, but this languished in obscurity: it appeared in a minor literary series for which it was commissioned, in apparent ignorance of the real nature of Russell's work, after Russell won the Nobel prize for literature.

ECONOMIST: Obituary in brief

Formal proof is a notion developed in the early part of the 20th century by logicians such as Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, along with mathematicians such as David Hilbert (who can fairly be described as the father of modern mathematics) and Nicolas Bourbaki, the pseudonym of a group of French mathematicians who sought to place all of mathematics on a rigorous footing.

ECONOMIST: Just what does it mean to prove something?