Happy Ada Lovelace Day!Rózsa Péter (1905-1977) was a Hungarian mathematician and early contributor to the theory of (primitive) recursive functions. She received her PhD in 1935 from (what is now) Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Her fellow student Laszlo Kálmár had introduced her a few years earlier to the then brand-new work of Gödel, and … Continue reading Rózsa Péter

If you have access to Oxford Scholarship Online, you can now read Mancosu's excellent collection The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice via the internets. Contemporary philosophy of mathematics offers us an embarrassment of riches. But anyone familiar with this area will be aware of the need for new approaches that will pay closer attention to mathematical … Continue reading Philosophy of Mathematical Practice Online

Robin Milner died on March 20. He was a leading theoretical computer scientist who developed the LCF theorem prover, the ML programming language, and introduced the π-calculus. He was founding director of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and then Professor of Computer Science at Cambridge. Milner was a … Continue reading Robin Milner, 1934-2010

From today's mini-AIR: The Oscillating Humans Project, announced here, is searching for a living specimen - an exemplar - of an oscillating human.DEFINITION: For purposes of the project, an Oscillating Human is someone who consistently, repeatedly, over many years, expresses opinions directly opposite to opinions he or she expressed earlier, always ignoring and/or denying the … Continue reading People Who Oscillate