Louis Couturat (January 17, 1868-August 3, 1914) was a French linguist, philosopher, logician, and mathematician.

He was born in Ris-Orangis (near Paris), France and was educated as a philosopher and mathematician at the École Normale Supérieure. He then took a professorship at the University of Toulouse, and subsequently at the College de France.

He was interested in symbolic logic as a way to study the history of philosophy and the philosophy of mathematics.

His first major writing was "De l'Infini mathématique" (1896), followed by a collection of the unpublished works of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1901, which came to the attention of Bertrand Russell. In 1905 he produced an edition of Russell's Principia Mathematica with a commentary, as well as a book entitled "L'Algèbre de la logique" (1905). Beginning in 1907 he became one of the major participants in the movement to create Ido, a version of the international auxiliary language Esperanto considered by its enthusiasts to be a significant improvement, but rejected by the bulk of the Esperanto movement.

A confirmed pacifist, he nevertheless was an indirect casualty of World War I, as his car was hit by the car carrying orders for the mobilization of the French army. He died between Ris-Oranges and Melun, France.

External references

• Biography on University of St. Andrews site, Scotland
• Couturat's The Logic of Leibniz