Legendary mathematicians: They're just like us! Hilbert shovels the snow Alexandroff and Göppert hang by the pool Lewy, Friedrichs, and van der Waerden correct proofs in Courant's garden.

Legendary mathematicians: They're just like us! Hilbert shovels the snow Alexandroff and Göppert hang by the pool Lewy, Friedrichs, and van der Waerden correct proofs in Courant's garden.
Sad news via the FOM list today: Published in Tennessean on Nov. 6, 2016 Bjarni Jónsson, originally of Draghals, Iceland, passed away in Cincinnati, OH on Friday, September 30, 2016 at the age of 96. Beloved husband of the late Harriet P. (nee Parkes) Jonsson. Devoted father of Eric (Kaye) Jonsson, Meryl (Bob) Runion Rose … Continue reading Bjarni Jónsson, 1920-2016
In May 2017, both the Society for Exact Philosophy and the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy will hold their annual meetings at the University of Calgary. Come for one, stay for the other, or come for both and stay for Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies! Keynotes will be … Continue reading (SEP ∧ SSHAP) → Calgary
I went through old floppies when I went back home over the summer and found the first logic paper I ever wrote! It was on proof theory and general algebra (I guess I must have taken courses in both at the time--1992). For your amusement: A Paedagogical Example of Cut-Elimination
Johanna Franklin has taken on the thankless task of tallying and analyzing the number (and proportion) of female invited speakers at meetings organized by the Association for Symbolic Logic. Her posts are up at the Women in Logic blog: Gender ratios of speakers at ASL meetings ASL Annual Meetings, 1989-2016 (The ASL Membership committee received … Continue reading Women Speakers at ASL Meetings
In 1991, I videotaped talks at the Kurt Gödel Colloquium in Kirchberg (it was supposed to be held jointly with the Wittgenstein Symposium, that got cancelled). I also videotaped a conversation with Hao Wang and Robin Gandy, students and friends, respectively, of Gödel and Turing. I can't for the life of me remember who the … Continue reading Interview with Hao Wang and Robin Gandy
The 2017 Spring Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic will be held jointly with the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, April 12-15, 2017, in Seattle. The members of the Program Committee are Wesley Holliday, Audrey Yap, and Richard Zach (Chair). There will be three Special Sessions: Modality and … Continue reading ASL Spring Meeting at the APA Pacific, Seattle, April 2017
content/history
. I’ve just uploaded a whole bunch of photos that don’t have associated biographies (yet). Some of them are not well-known, even.
For the technicalities, I’ll repeat myself from the previous post:
We have a separate repository for photos:Tracking down these pictures and getting permissions was (and continues to be) a surprising amount of work. Thanks to all the people and archives who provided them and granted permissions: the IAS archives, Princeton University Library, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, the Russell Archives at McMaster, the Archives of the Universities of Warsaw and Wittenberg-Halle, the ILLC, the Austrian National Library, the NSUB at Göttingen, the National Portrait Gallery, the Oslo Museum, Neil Reid (Julia Robinson’s brother-in-law), Libby Marcus (Ruth Barcan Marcus’s daughter), Kim Heffernan (Haskell Curry’s granddaughter), Eckhardt Menzler-Trott, Craig Smorynski, and Peter van Emde Boas. Detailed photo credits are included with the photos. Thanks also to the Alberta OER initiative for providing some funding to do this. And last, but not least, thanks to Joel Fuller for doing an awesome job with PhotoShop restoring some of these photos (the original Curry photo, in particular, had a big tear right through the middle)! More to come!github.com/OpenLogicProject/photos
. We’ve separated them because (a) the licensing issues are more complicated: some of the photos are under copyright, and we wanted everything in the main repository to be available under a Creative Commons license; (b) the main repository would become very large if it included all these pictures. To use the pictures, clone the photos repository into theassets/
subdirectory of your local OLP clone. There’s a PDF with all the photos on the build site.
An article just published in Quanta Magazine by Natalie Wolchover covers a recent result from reverse mathematics. Keita Yokoyama and Ludovic Patey showed that Ramsey's theorem for pairs is finitistically reducible, i.e., it is $latex \Pi_3$ conservative over $latex I\Sigma_1$. The article explains Ramsey's theorem, but also Hilbert's program and its more recent relativizations, i.e., … Continue reading Quanta Magazine Covers Reverse Mathematics
12-14 October 2016 Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich In the course of the last century, different general frameworks for the foundations of mathematics have been investigated. The orthodox approach to foundations interprets mathematics in the universe of sets. More recently, however, there have been other developments that call into question the whole method … Continue reading CfA: Foundations of Mathematical Structuralism
The European Meeting of the ASL will be held in Leeds this year, July 31 to August 6. The deadline to submit a contributed talk is tomorrow! For details, see the conference website!
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has announced its 2016 class of fellows. Menachem Magidor (Hebrew University) has been elected Honorary Foreign Member. Vann McGee (MIT) has been elected to the Philosophy and Religious Studies section.
Stewart Shapiro gave the 2nd annual Calgary Philosophy & Mathematics Lecture a month ago. Video of his talk, "Potential Infinity: A Modal Account," is now available on mathtube.org.
Richard Zach, "Natural Deduction for the Sheffer Stroke and Peirce’s Arrow (and any Other Truth-Functional Connective)," Journal of Philosophical Logic 45(2) (2016), pp. 183–197. Methods available for the axiomatization of arbitrary finite-valued logics can be applied to obtain sound and complete intelim rules for all truth-functional connectives of classical logic including the Sheffer stroke (NAND) … Continue reading Natural deduction for the Sheffer stroke and Peirce’s arrow (and any other truth-functional connective)
My friend and colleague Helmut Veith died yesterday. His death is a great and shocking loss to his family and friends, and the logic community, especially in Austria. I've known Helmut since we were undergraduates in computer science at Vienna Technical University in the early 1990s. We shared a passion for theoretical topics in computer … Continue reading Helmut Veith (1971-2016)
(Cross-posted from the Open Logic Project) Two exciting new things from the Open Logic Project. The first one is another sample textbook. I’ve previously written about how to get your textbook to print, and for my course “Logic II (Phil 379)” this term, I’ve done that. Properly: perfect bound paperbacks, with a nice cover, proper … Continue reading An Actual Textbook, and: Photos!