The first two people to email me their address get a postcard with a special Gödel Centennial stamp.

Day 2, Friday, was Gödel's birthday. I showed up for the panel discussion on unknowability, which wasn't particularly enlightening. Then Piergiorgio Odifreddi gave a very entertaining talk, in which he speculated on what philosophical writings may have served as inspiration for Gödel's results. He focussed on three figures: Aristotle, Kant, and Leibniz and drew some … Continue reading Gödel Centennial, Day 2

Thanks, Peter, for telling me about your blog. Not.Watch Logic Matters! And thanks (seriously) to Martijn Vermaat.

Here's where I channel Brian Leiter:Distinguished logician and computer scientist Georg Gottlob, former chair of the Department of Information Systems at the University of Technology, Vienna, moves to Oxford University. This is a great loss for the TU Wien and the Viennese logic community. It is to be hoped that Gottlob will continue to be … Continue reading Computational Logician Gottlob from Vienna to Oxford

A new logic blog, from Ole Hjortland, St. Andrews: Nothing of Consequence.(I collect logic blogs. If you have one and it's not on my blogroll, tell me!)

Gödel would have turned 100 years old today. Happy Birthday, Kurtele! Merry Gödelmas, everyone else! I'm going to report on today's sessions (well, on Hajek's and Putnam's) at the Gödel Centennial conference tomorrow, since I have to get ready now for the fancy Gala Dinner at the Belvedere Palace. ("Black Tie Optional". I guess I'll … Continue reading Happy 100, Kurtele!

Dana Scott just told this joke, which he heard from Ray Smullyan: Two professors at a math conference stand in front of a blackboard, on which is written the sentence "Only an idiot would believe a sentence like this!" The first professor asks the second, "Do you believe that?" The second answers, "Of course not! … Continue reading Logic Joke

I'm in Vienna for the Gödel Centennial conference, Horizons of Truth. Day 1 featured talks by: Angus MacIntyre, How much has mathematics been affected by Gödel's work? His answer: not much (yet). He surveyed the developments arising from Gödel's work (recursion theory, definability theory, results on noncomputability of classical problems such as the undecidability of … Continue reading Gödel Centennial, Day 1

The February issue of Synthese is a special issue on proof-theoretic semantics, edited by Reinhard Kahle and Peter Schröder-Heister. It's papers from a conference in Tübingen in 1999. Dag Prawitz, Meaning Approached Via ProofsPeter Schroeder-Heister, Validity Concepts in Proof-theoretic SemanticsPatrizio Contu, The Justification of the Logical Laws RevisitedLars Hallnäs, On the Proof-theoretic Foundation of General … Continue reading Proof-theoretic Semantics in Synthese

Call for Papers:Uncertainty: Reasoning about probability and vaguenessSeptember 5 to 8, PragueUncertainty is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday life, but it is also a topic of fundamental significance to many scientific disciplines. Uncertainty taken here in a broad sense, has many facets - among them probability and vagueness, including possibility, confidence, fuzziness etc. These are … Continue reading Uncertainty: Reasoning about probability and vagueness, Prague, Sept 5-8, 2006

Sad news: Torkel Franzén has died yesterday. I've known Torkel since my undergraduate days, when he was tirelessly setting people straight on logical and philosophical matters in the newsgroup sci.logic. He wrote two wonderful books, a technical book on incompleteness (Inexhaustibility: A Non-Exhaustive Treatment) and one on misconceptions and misuses of Gödel's Theorems. He will … Continue reading Torkel Franzén

One of the corollaries that easily follow from Gödel's first incompleteness theorem for arithmetic is the incompleteness of second-order logic: there can be no proof system that generates all and only the validities of second-order logic. It follows from the incompleteness of arithmetic because for any sentences φ of first-order arithmetic, there is a sentence … Continue reading Incompleteness of Second-Order Logic

A whole bunch of conference announcements came in over the Proof Theory and FOM lists the other day:Logic Colloquium. July 27-August 2, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Submission deadline: April 17.Workshop on Hybrid Logics. August 11, Seattle (part of FLoC). Submission deadline: May 26.Computer Science Logic. September 25-29, Szeged, Hungary. Submission deadline: abstracts April 24, full papers May … Continue reading Logic Conferences

Thomas Dolby has a blog. And so do the UConn philosophy grad students.

Amazon.de emailed me today, suggesting that I preorder Kurt Gödel: The Album. There's not that much info on the amazon.de page, nor on the Vieweg page, but it's the book to accompany the exhibition the editors (Karl Sigmund, John Dawson and Kurt Mühlberger) are putting on for the Gödel Centenary in Vienna.

Don't know how I missed this: Yarden Katz has a blog, CrunchyLogic.

The new issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society is devoted to Kurt Gödel's life and work.