Maureen Eckert is organizing Summer Program for Diversity: Logic at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth from May 22-28, 2016.  The program is open to undergraduates and recent graduates from underrepresented groups; there are 10 spaces and travel & lodging are provided.  The topic of the program is paradoxes: Paradoxes present the ultimate challenge—contradictions. Logicians and … Continue reading Diversity Summer Program on Paradoxes

Bill Craig died early Thursday morning at the age of 97.  He was a member of Berkeley's philosophy department since 1961, and a central figure in Berkeley's logic community.  He was warm, supportive, approachable, just really a wonderful person. Berkeley's memorial notice is here. We were office mates of sorts for two years.  I was … Continue reading William Craig, 1918-2016

Karl Sigmund has a book on the Vienna Circle (to accompany the wonderful Vienna Circle exhibition this Fall for the University of Vienna's 650th anniversary). Sie nannten sich Der Wiener Kreis:Exaktes Denken am Rand des Untergangs is an accessible introduction to the history and context of the Vienna Circle.  You may not need such an … Continue reading Vote for Sigmund’s Vienna Circle Book

[The following remarks were delivered today by Andy Arana at the beginning of a joint Paris-Davis workshop on the philosophy of mathematics, and are posted here with his permission and that of Curtis Franks.  The photo above shows Aldo at a cook-off with Marco Panza at the last instalment of that workshop series in Davis, … Continue reading Remembering Aldo Antonelli

My Dear Lady Byron I have received your note and should have answered no further than that I was very glad to find my apprehension (of being a party to doing mischief if I assisted Lady Lovelace’s studies without any caution) is unfounded in the opinion of yourself and Lord Lovelace, who must be better … Continue reading De Morgan on Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace was born 200 years ago today.  Here's a roundup of articles: Meet Countess Ada Lovelace, The World’s First Computer Programmer (MTV) Remembering Ada Lovelace, computer-music prognosticator (Boston Globe) Die Zahlenzauberin (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, German)

This is cool: In today's Nature, Toby Cubitt, David Perez-Garcia, and Michael Wolf published a paper, "Undecidability of the spectral gap." A short writeup is in Nature News, and an extended paper is on arXiv. It shows a problem in quantum physics--the spectral gap problem--to be undecidable by reducing the halting problem to it. In … Continue reading An Undecidable Quantum Physics Problem

Spent today figuring out how to get LaTeX to produce interior and cover PDFs you can use with print-on-demand/self-publishing services such as Lulu and Blurb. Wrote about it at the Open Logic Project.

Our awesome students are putting on a graduate student conference next May in Calgary!  It's right before Congress2015, i.e., the big congress of Canadian humanities & social sciences societies, which includes the Canadian Philosophical Association, the Canadian Society for the History & Philosophy of Mathematics, and the Canadian Society for the History & Philosophy of … Continue reading Grad Conference on Logic & Language

Rózsa Péter was one of the pioneers of recursive function theory. I wrote a short post about her for Ada Lovelace Day in 2010.  More recently, I've found this nice reminiscence/bio by Béla Andrásfai, a Hungarian graph theorist and Péter's adoptive son.  I managed to track down one of his daughters, Eszter, who was so … Continue reading Rózsa Péter, Pioneer of Computability Theory

I came across this long-lost photograph of Jacques Herbrand in a paper by Marcel Guillaume, "La logique mathématique en France entre les deux guerres mondiales : Quelques repères," Revue d'histoire des sciences 1/2009 (Tome 62) , p. 177-219. It turns out that the photo was taken by Natascha Artin Brunswick in 1931, when Herbrand visited Hamburg.  … Continue reading Herbrand Photograph by Natascha Artin Brunswick

The book symposium I organized for this year's Pacific APA on Greg Frost-Arnold's Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard: Conversations of Logic, Mathematics, and Science (Chicago: Open Court, 2013) is coming out in the journal Metascience.  The papers are now online: Rick Creath, Understandability Gary Ebbs, Quine’s “predilection” for finitism Greg Lavers, Carnap’s surprising views … Continue reading Book Symposium on Greg Frost-Arnold’s “Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard” in Metascience

Aldo Antonelli unexpectedly died two days ago, and I can't write about that without crying yet. Meanwhile, I recommend this beautiful paper to you: On the General Interpretation of First-Order Quantifiers, published in the ASL journal he founded, the Review of Symbolic Logic.

I know you've been waiting for the definitive assessment of what Carnap was up to in his unpublished Untersuchungen zur Allgemeinen Axiomatik from the late 1920s.  Georg Schiemer, Erich Reck, and I wrote a paper about it.  I'll leave it to you to judge whether this paper is the definitive assessment you've been waiting for.  … Continue reading Carnap’s Early Metatheory

At the 2014 Pacific APA I organized a book symposium (aka, author-meets-critics) on Patricia Blanchette's Frege's Conception of Logic (OUP 2012).  The contributions by Roy Cook, Marcus Rossberg, and Kai Wehmeier have just been published in the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy, together with Paddy's replies.