Louis Couturat

**Louis Couturat** (born January 17, 1868 – died August 3, 1914) was a French thinker who worked on logic, mathematics, philosophy, and languages. He is best known for helping create the planned language Ido.

### Early life and education

Couturat was born in Paris. In 1887, he began studying philosophy and mathematics at a top school in France, the École normale supérieure. Later, he taught philosophy at the University of Toulouse (1895) and the University of Caen Normandy (1897). There, he supported the use of transfinite numbers, which are a type of math dealing with infinity.

He also studied the writings of the famous philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Hanover, Germany. In 1905, he became an assistant to Henri-Louis Bergson, a well-known philosopher, at the Collège de France.

### Career Highlights

Couturat promoted symbolic logic, a system that uses symbols to express logical ideas. This field grew before World War I, influenced by thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, Giuseppe Peano, and Bertrand Russell (a close friend of Couturat). Couturat believed symbolic logic could improve both math and the philosophy of math. He disagreed with Henri Poincaré, who criticized his views. Couturat’s ideas aligned with Russell's logicism, while Poincaré leaned towards intuitionism, a different approach to math.

### The Ido Language

In 1907, Couturat helped create Ido, a new language inspired by Esperanto. He believed it should be a logical and easy-to-learn international language. Ido borrowed words from European languages and followed ideas similar to Leibniz’s dream of a universal symbolic language.

### Death

Couturat was a strong believer in peace. Tragically, he died in a car accident when his car collided with another carrying urgent military orders at the start of World War I.

## His writings

- 1896: _De Platonicis mythis_ _Thesim Facultati Litterarum Parisiensi proponebat Ludovicus Couturat, Scholae Normalae olim alumnus_. Parisiis: Felix Alcan Bibliopola. 120 p.
- 1896: _De l'Infini mathématique_. Republished 1975, Georg Olms.
- 1901: _La Logique de Leibniz_. Republished 1961, Georg Olms. Donald Rutherford's English translation in progress.
- 1903: _Opuscules et Fragments Inédits de Leibniz_. Republished 1966, Georg Olms.
- 1903: (with Léopold Leau) _Histoire de la langue universelle_. Paris: Hachette. Republished 2001, Olms.
- 1905. _Les Principes des Mathématiques: avec un appendice sur la philosophie des mathématiques de Kant_. Republished 1965, Georg Olms.
- 1905: _L'Algèbre de la logique_. 1914: P. E. B. Jourdain translator, The Algebra of Logic, Open Court, from Project Gutenberg.
- 1906: ¨_Pour la langue internationale_, Päris
- 1907: (with Léopold Leau) _Les nouvelles langues internationales_. Paris: Hachette, republished 2001, Olms.
- 1910: _Étude sur la dérivation dans la langue internationale_. Paris: Delagrave. 100 p.
- 1910: (with Otto Jespersen, R. Lorenz, Wilhelm Ostwald and L.Pfaundler) _International Language and Science: Considerations on the Introduction of an International Language into Science_, Constable and Company Limited, London.
- 1915: (with Louis de Beaufront) _Dictionnari Français-Ido_. Paris: Chaix, 586 p.

## Cultural Impact

Couturat appears as a character in _A Curable Romantic_, a 2010 novel by Joseph Skibell.

## Other websites

- Auteur Couturat on French Wikisource

## Infobox (person)

- **name**: Louis Couturat
- **image**: Louis-Couturat2.jpg
- **birth date**: 17 January 1868
- **birth place**: Paris, France
- **death place**: Ris-Orangis, Essonne, France
- **nationality**: French
- **known for**: Ido (language), Ido
- **occupation**: Logician, philosopher, mathematician and linguist