ABSTRACT
In 1906 there appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Whitehead's memoir “On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World”. 1 It had been read before the Society some months earlier. Its object was to show how one could construct alternative concepts of the physical world. It should be pointed out that although Whitehead had worked in pure mathematics and logic, his Fellowship dissertation at Trinity 2 had been on Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, in which he seems to have retained an interest throughout his life. In this memoir he brings together axiomatic theory and the physical view of nature in terms of continuity assumed in electromagnetic theory. These two strands of thought are to be found running through his later writings, namely, an interest in abstract structure and its relation to the physical world.
