Very sad news today: Grisha Mints has died.  He was born June 7, 1939 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). He received his education in mathematics at Leningrad State University under N. A. Shanin, and held positions there, at the Steklov Institute in Leningrad, and then, from 1980-1991, at the Estonian Academy of Science in Tallinn.  … Continue reading Grigori Mints, 1939-2014

Here's a simple way to pretty-print documentation included as comments in a source file (I'm mainly interested in LaTEX code), with or without the intervening code.  It's useful if you don't want to bother with a more complicated solution such as LaTeX's docstrip + ltxdoc.  It uses the ubiquitous bash tools grep and cut (available … Continue reading Simple Way to Document Code with Markdown, grep, and pandoc

Just came via the proof theory mailing list. I'm wondering why the ASL is not mentioned along with the EATCS, EACSL, and KGS. Dear Colleague, I am delighted to announce the formation of a new special interest group focussed on logic and computation. The new SIG will be called SIGLOG. The officers are: Prakash Panangaden … Continue reading SIGLOG Launches

The Arthur Prior Centenary Conference will be held at Balliol College, Oxford, on 21–22 August 2014, to celebrate the work of Arthur Norman Prior (1914-1969). Prior was a Fellow of Balliol and famous for his contributions to logic, ethics and metaphysics, but most of all he is known as the founder and principal inventor of … Continue reading Arthur Prior Centenary Conference, August 21-22, 2014

Ergo is a new general philosophy journal, open access, licensed under CC, with an innovative editorial model and triple-blind review.  Their first issue with four papers was published today, the papers are discussed on topic-appropriate blogs. Read the report on submissions, turn-around times, etc., by the editors Jonathan Weisberg and Franz Huber here. First issue: … Continue reading Ergo Publishes First Issue, Report

Within the VIDI project ‘The Roots of Deduction’ led by Catarina Dutilh Novaes, the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen is advertising a 12-month post-doc position, to commence in January 2015 or shortly thereafter. Given the broad scope of the project, candidates with a number of different backgrounds will be considered, as long … Continue reading Post-doc in Groningen: The Roots of Deduction

Bored by small powers of 2? You can now play 2048, but with large cardinals instead. For the long version, you have to get all the way to 0=1. Fork by Chris Le Sueur, h/t David Schrittesser

The SEP finally has an entry on Jan Łukasiwicz, by Peter Simons: Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956) was a Polish logician and philosopher who introduced mathematical logic into Poland, became the earliest founder of the Warsaw school of logic, and one of the principal architects and teachers of that school. His most famous achievement was to give … Continue reading SEP Entry on Łukasiewicz

Helmut Veith and I are organizing a special session at the Logic Colloquium in Vienna.  The panelists will be Byron Cook (Microsoft Research), Alexander Leitsch (University of Technology Vienna), Prakash Panangaden (McGill University), Nicole Schweikardt (Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main). The abstract copied from the ASL Committee on logic Education page: Logic has been called the … Continue reading The Place of Logic in Computer Science Education

Wow. Learn something new every day. a) BASIC just turned 50 years old four days ago. b) You know who invented BASIC? John G. Kemeny, student of Alonzo Church, and the guy who's credited with first defining the now-standard notion of truth in a model! (Kemeny was apparently also a great president at Dartmouth, opening … Continue reading Did You Know Who Invented BASIC!?

Please add your favorite Frege joke in comments (or tweet @RrrichardZach with #fregejokes hashtag). Doesn't have to be good. In fact, just any logic joke is fine.

Check out the funded doctoral program in logic in computer science! http://logic-cs.at/phd/ TU Wien, TU Graz, and JKU Linz are seeking exceptionally talented and motivated students for their joint doctoral program LogiCS. The LogiCS doctoral college focuses on interdisciplinary research topics covering (i) computational logic, and applications of logic to (ii) databases and artificial intelligence … Continue reading Funded PhD Positions in Vienna (Logic in CS)

The LaTeX package bussproofs.sty for typesetting natural deduction/sequent calculus proofs is nifty especially for its nice alignment of sequents.  By contrast to the proof.sty package, it doesn't allow you to typeset missing parts of a proof, though. proofs.sty has the \deduce command for that; it typesets vertical dots instead of a horizontal inference line. I … Continue reading bpextra: entire deductions in bussproofs.sty