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

Last May, Ohio State had a conference in honor of Harvey Friedman’s 60th birthday. Videos of the talks are now available (via Neil Tennant). These include talks by Friedman himself, as well as John Burgess, Sam Buss, Mic Detlefsen, Sol Feferman, Hartry Field, Rohit Parikh, Grisha Mints, Wilfried Sieg, Ted Slaman, Patrick Suppes, and many … Continue reading Videos from Foundational Adventures Conference

In his talk this morning, Grisha Mints referred to a paper by Paul Cohen. He didn’t have the reference handy, so I tracked it down: Paul J. Cohen, Skolem and pessimism about proof in mathematics. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2005) 363, 2407–2418. The entire issue, on meeting on “The nature of mathmatical proof” organized … Continue reading The Nature of Mathematical Proof

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 Proofs Peter Schroeder-Heister, Validity Concepts in Proof-theoretic Semantics Patrizio Contu, The Justification of the Logical Laws Revisited Lars Hallnäs, On the Proof-theoretic … Continue reading Proof-theoretic Semantics in Synthese

Two greats of German logic turned 60 not too long ago: Helmut Schwichtenberg in 2002 and Wolfram Pohlers in 2003. Both had birthday conferences held in their honor, and the proceedings thereof appear in the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic this year, the Schwichtenberg Festschrift in the May and the Pohlers Festschrift in the … Continue reading Schwichtenberg and Pohlers Festschriften

If you happen to be in or near Vienna, there’s a little workshop at the TU Wien, Monday to Wednesday of next week, sponsored by the Gödel Society. It’s on cut-elimination; speakers include Lev Beklemishev, Ale Carbone, Grigori Mints, Pavel Pudlák, and Helmut Schwichtenberg as well as a bunch of up-and-coming young logicians like Arnold … Continue reading Collegium Logicum 2005: Cut Elimination

Continuing my earlier posts about logic and philosophy, here’s a little survey of the top 36 US philosophy departments, what logic courses they offer, and what the logic requirements for PhD and BA are there. The next time I feel like procrastinating, I’ll do this for the rest of the US programs, and UK, Australasian, … Continue reading Formal Logic and Philosophy III

While everyone else is blogging from the NDC, I’m in Turin at the European Summer Meeting of the Association of Symbolic Logic, aka LC’04.  Highlights so far: Grisha Mints’ opening talk on Monday, in which he presented a result showing that all intuitionistic Frege systems polynomially simulate each other.  It uses some interesting recent work … Continue reading Live from the Logic Colloquium