At the Logic Education session at the APA/ASL meeting last week, Branden Fitelson made an excellent suggestion for teachers of graduate level logic courses in philosophy: One of the main problems is that it is often hard to see for students why the stuff they have to learn is relevant to philosophy (or to CS … Continue reading Motivating Advanced Logic

The European Summer School for Logic, Language and Information will be held in Edinburgh, 8-19 August 2005. You can now register on their website. Lots of interesting-looking courses, including ones by Greg Restall on cut-elimination and normalization, by Matthias Baaz and Alex Leitsch on computational analysis of proofs, on dynamic epistemic logic by Hans von … Continue reading ESSLLI open for registration

I'm off to the APA Pacific/ASL Spring meeting in San Fran. Look for me in the picket line outside the St Francis (and, ok, well, maybe I'll also go to the receptions--Friday 5-7 at the ASL Reception, and then 8-10 at the Presidential Reception). If I manage to steal internet access somewhere, I'll report on … Continue reading Off to San Francisco

One last plug for the Logic Instruction and Philosophy Graduate Training session at this week's APA/ASL meeting in San Francisco: It will take place as scheduled in the evil St. Francis hotel. Nevertheless, we hope you can all come. Note that Delia Graff won't be joining us, unfortunately; but Brian Weatherson has agreed to participate … Continue reading Logic Education Session at the San Francisco APA/ASL meeting this Saturday

Sam Buss has put up an interesting paper on Edward Nelson's philosophy of mathematics and its relation to his (Nelson's) proof theoretical work.

In the last post, I pointed to some interesting work on cut-elimination and complexity of proofs. This reminded me of Richard Statman's wonderful dissertation (Structural complexity of proofs, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 1974). The two most widely investigated measures of proof complexity are size (number of symbols) and length (number of steps). Statman and Orevkov's … Continue reading Complexity measures of proofs

If you've wondered what all this "cut elimination" business is about, here's a nice blog entry (on That Logic Blog) which gives a nice introduction. Jon points out that proofs with cut have (at least--depends on the logic) exponential speedup over proofs with cut. This result is due to Statman and Orevkov. Jon points to … Continue reading Eliminating cuts

Wow. CiteUlike is the best thing since Brian's OPP blog. Here's what it does: There are feeds for journals from all major publishers, plus arXiv and such. You can set up a watchlist of journal and other feeds, or other user's libraries, and then build your own library of online papers, with keywords, comments, and … Continue reading CiteULike is The Coolest Thing!

John asks if logicians should give in in the face of rising acceptance of the use of "begging the question" for "raising the question." I agree with the commenters: we should not. Also check out this delightful (and correct) use of "begs the question," posted by Sean Carroll: I once heard an astrophysics seminar with … Continue reading Begging the Question

I've been irritated for a long time that the "ö" in "Gödel" doesn't show up right on this blog. The problem was caused by the web server setting the charset in the header, thus overriding the UTF-8 charset declaration in the pages themselves. It should be fixed now, but let me know if I still … Continue reading Charset Problem Fixed

Another logic/language/philosophy of math blog started up yesterday: languageandlogic.net. It's still anonymous, but the author wrote over at consequently.org that she'll put up contact details soon. One of the first posts discusses the fact that natural deductions for ordinary propositional logic normalizes (well, at least without negation it does), but it doesn't when you add … Continue reading New Blog, Tonk, and Normalization

Jim Holt reviews two new books on Gödel and Einstein, and Yourgrau's A World Without Time. It's a nice little story about what Gödel and Einstein talked about in their daily walks to the office. The books are Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness (NYT review here) and John S. Rigden's Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness.

Philosophia Mathematica, the only (and hence, the) journal on philosophy of mathematics, is now being published/distributed by Oxford University Press (for cooperation with the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/Société canadienne d'histoire et de philosophie des mathématiques. That means, in particular, that it's now (finally!) available online. The latest issue (February 2005) even … Continue reading Philosophia Mathematica now online through OUP