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

From Abstruse Goose:

Sorry for the long silence...You may have heard by now, but in case you haven't: The Group in Logic, Language, and Information at King's College is threatened by "budget cuts": looks like the administration is just willfully destroying it by firing several faculty.Information and links to protest sites etc. given here.

Leila Haapaaranta's collection The Development of Modern Logic came out earlier this year. It's a handy one-volume compendium to the history of logic in the modern era (full disclosure: I have an article in it). The price tag might still be a bit steep: $150, although that buys you over 1,000 pages of scholarship in … Continue reading The Development of Modern Logic Online

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

Today on Dinosaur Comics:

From the ASL Newsletter, I just learned that Per Lindström died two months ago: Per (Pelle) Lindström, the Swedish logician, died in Gothenburg, Sweden, on August 21, 2009, after a short period of illness. He was born on April 9, 1936, and spent most of his academic life at the Department of Philosophy, University of … Continue reading Per Lindström, 1936-2009

New book out from Princeton UP on the Graduate Education Initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, discussed on Inside Higher Ed. Not sure if any philosophy departments participated. In light of previous discussion on differential attrition rates for women in the pipeline, this should be interesting: Chapter 7 addresses a matter of continuing concern … Continue reading Reforming Graduate Education

Following up on my previous post, Women in the Academic Pipeline, where I compared rates at which women earned BAs and PhDs in various fields in the US: what does it look like in the faculty ranks? Not surprisingly, the percentages in general go down as you go higher, but there are some interesting (and … Continue reading Women in the Academic Pipeline II

Topoi has a series of "untimely reviews", where classic works of philosophy are reviewed as if they had just been published. Hannes Leitgeb did one on Carnap's Aufbau, where he not only pretends that it was just published, but also pretends (as I guess you'd have to if you take the premise seriously) that it … Continue reading Leitgeb’s “Untimely Review” of Carnap’s Aufbau

Catarina's comment on the previous post prompted me to find out what the pipeline looks like in philosophy, and so I went to the tables from the Digest of Education Statistics (of the US, tables of Bachelor's, master's, and doctor's degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by sex of student and field of study) and made … Continue reading Women in the Academic Pipeline

I'm glad to see some more discussion of the gender situation in philosophy discussed more widely. It started with an article in The Philosopher's Magazine, "Where are all the women?" which was then picked up in "A dearth of women philosophers" in the NYT. There are some interesting responses on Feminist Philosophers blog (first, second, … Continue reading Women in Philosophy

Deductions is a program that is designed to help understand and construct proofs in natural deduction (in the Logic Book style). It runs only on Macs, so I couldn't try it out, but the videos look interesting.

Since reading Logicomix (which, as I said, I really like), I've been wondering about the "logic and madness" theme that runs through the book. In the making-of movie (which I also recommend), Papadimitriou says at the beginning, "We were both interested in this very curious fact, that the majority of the protagonists of this intellectual … Continue reading Logic and Madness?

A revised version of Hubert Kennedy's 1980 biography of Giuseppe Peano, is available as a free download and a cheap print-on-demand paperback through lulu.com: Peano: Life and Works of Giuseppe Peano.

Sydney Padua has produced a number of amazing and funny comics on Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, and the Difference Engine. It's a bit hard to navigate, to get to all three installments of "Lovelace and Babbage vs. The Economy" you have to click on the "Economic Model" link in the sidebar. The upside is, though, … Continue reading The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Several of the commenters on my previous post on motivating the study of logic in my intro class have suggested that one important aspect of logic is the precision it affords, and hence the usefulness of logic in avoiding ambiguities. So I tried to find some nice examples of where ambiguity in natural language—and the … Continue reading Deadly Ambiguity