G. Spencer-Brown

degrees in 1954 from both Oxford and Cambridge, and wrote his doctorate thesis Probability and Scientific Inference under the supervision of William Kneale which was published as a book in 1957.

[5] Laws of Form has influenced, among others, Heinz von Foerster, Louis Kauffman, Niklas Luhmann, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Leon Conrad,[6] and William Bricken.

[7] The preface of the 1979 edition of Laws of Form repeats that claim, and further states that the generally accepted computational proof by Appel, Haken, and Koch has 'failed' (page xii).

[citation needed] While not denying some of his talent, not all critics of Spencer-Brown's claims and writings have been willing to assess them at his own valuation; the poetry is at the most charitable reading an idiosyncratic taste, and some prominent voices have been decidedly dismissive of the value of his formal material.

For example Martin Gardner wrote in his essay: "M-Pire Maps": In December of 1976 G. Spencer-Brown, the maverick British mathematician, startled his colleagues by announcing he had a proof of the four-color theorem that did not require computer checking.

At the end of three months all the experts who attended the seminar agreed that the proofs logic was laced with holes, but Spencer-Brown returned to England still sure of its validity.

Spencer-Brown is the author of a curious little book called Laws of Form,[12] which is essentially a reconstruction of the propositional calculus by means of an eccentric notation.