Yarden Katz writes per email: There's a new site out -- videolectures.net -- where anyone can post videos of academic lectures. Right now it's dominated by (very good) machine learning and statistics lectures, but there's nothing on logic or philosophy. I was looking online for videos of logic-related lectures to add, but found virtually none. … Continue reading Videos of Lectures

Recent posts on the status of women in philosophy made me want to know what the situation is in logic. In philosophical logic it's not good. I have a hunch that it's better in logic generally, but haven't had time to check this. The data I used is the number of publications in the Journal … Continue reading Women in (Philosophical) Logic

Via LtU, David Turner on Church's Thesis, the lambda calculus, and the development of functional programming languages [PDF].

As Shawn said, much of Terence Tao's advice applies not just to mathematician, but also to philosophers (especially the "be considerate to your audience" and "talks are not the same as papers" parts, although disciplinary culture in philosophy seems still to deny at least the latter). I sometimes wish more people would use the wastebasket, … Continue reading Advice for (not just) mathematicians

The Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland, seeks to appoint a Lecturer in Logic. (Vacancy number: A248-07O. The position is a continuing one.) The successful applicant will be expected to undertake research, and to teach at introductory undergraduate, advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to supervise research students for the MA and PhD degrees. Applicants … Continue reading Logic job at Auckland, NZ

At LanguageLog.

Another one of the SEP entries commissioned by Paolo and me: The Early Development of Set Theory, by José Ferreirós, author of Labyrinth of Thought.

Ok, by popular demand, here's a list of the books in the new banner image:Ramsey, The Foundations of MathematicsHilbert and Bernays, Grundlagen der Mathematik I & II (2nd ed)Carnap, Logical Syntax of LanguageKneale and Kneale, The Development of LogicTarski, Einführung in die mathematische LogikRussell, Introduction to Mathematical PhilosophyRussell, Logic and KnowledgeBoolos, Logic, Logic, and LogicPeano, … Continue reading Bookshelf

Ok, it looks like the move worked. Please let me know if you notice anything broken. And, if you're reading this on a feed reader, check out the new site design for a second.

The University of Calgary is moving its websites to a Content Management System (Drupal, to be specific). My homepage is scheduled to be migrated tonight. Now, I've tried very hard to not break any URLs or links (the IT people probably hate me by now), but there will be some changes. For instance, all the … Continue reading Changes

TYPES Summer School 2007Proofs of Programs and Formalisation of MathematicsAugust 19-31 2007, Bertinoro, Italyhttp://TypesSummerSchool07.cs.unibo.it During the last ten years major achievements have been made in using computers for interactive proof developments to produce secure software and to show interesting mathematical results. Recent major results are, for instance, the complete formalisation of a proof of the … Continue reading TYPES Summer School 2007

Paul Cohen died on Friday of a rare lung disease. This came over FOM today: We are very sorry to tell you that Paul Cohen has suddenly passed away.He has had a rare lung disease for maybe two years now, but symptoms only began to really manifest about a year ago. We did not know … Continue reading Paul Cohen, 1934-2007

Mark Lance posted this insightful message to FOM yesterday, in response to this thread on "progress in philosophy": "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under "things in the broadest possible sense" I … Continue reading Philosophy Spin-offs

Alasdair Urquhart was nice enough to identify the model that's dominating the lounge at BIRS. It's an icosidodecahedral prismatohexacosihecatonicosachoron, and is made of 120 icosidodecahedra, 600 cuboctahedra, 720 pentagonal prisms, its faces are 3600 triangles, 3600 squares, 1440 pentagons, and it has 10,800 edges. I'm sure it's got something to do with E8 (the mapping … Continue reading Icosidodecahedral prismatohexacosihecatonicosachoron

My colleague Marc has updated his SEP entry on Species. Jon Willimason is starting a new online thing called The Reasoner. The Reasoner is a monthly digest highlighting exciting new research on reasoning and interesting new arguments. It is interdisciplinary, covering research in, e.g., philosophy, logic, AI, statistics, cognitive science, law, psychology, mathematics and the … Continue reading Species/the Reasoner

Ok, I wasn't really attacked so much as passed by. Anyway, the slides for my talk at the Annual Meeting are here.

Thanks to Greg for (almost) liveblogging the Banff workshop on Mathematical Methods in Philosophy. So go to Greg's blog to find out what happened!

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 by Alan … Continue reading The Nature of Mathematical Proof

Just in case you ever need it: \ddots going the other direction: \makeatletter\def\Ddots{\mathinner{\mkern1mu\raise\p@ \vbox{\kern7\p@\hbox{.}}\mkern2mu \raise4\p@\hbox{.}\mkern2mu\raise7\p@\hbox{.}\mkern1mu}}\makeatother Then you can say: \varepsilon_0= \omega^{\omega^{\Ddots}}