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

Here's a simple way to pretty-print documentation included as comments in a source file (I'm mainly interested in LaTEX code), with or without the intervening code.  It's useful if you don't want to bother with a more complicated solution such as LaTeX's docstrip + ltxdoc.  It uses the ubiquitous bash tools grep and cut (available … Continue reading Simple Way to Document Code with Markdown, grep, and pandoc

Just came via the proof theory mailing list. I'm wondering why the ASL is not mentioned along with the EATCS, EACSL, and KGS. Dear Colleague, I am delighted to announce the formation of a new special interest group focussed on logic and computation. The new SIG will be called SIGLOG. The officers are: Prakash Panangaden … Continue reading SIGLOG Launches

The Arthur Prior Centenary Conference will be held at Balliol College, Oxford, on 21–22 August 2014, to celebrate the work of Arthur Norman Prior (1914-1969). Prior was a Fellow of Balliol and famous for his contributions to logic, ethics and metaphysics, but most of all he is known as the founder and principal inventor of … Continue reading Arthur Prior Centenary Conference, August 21-22, 2014

Ergo is a new general philosophy journal, open access, licensed under CC, with an innovative editorial model and triple-blind review.  Their first issue with four papers was published today, the papers are discussed on topic-appropriate blogs. Read the report on submissions, turn-around times, etc., by the editors Jonathan Weisberg and Franz Huber here. First issue: … Continue reading Ergo Publishes First Issue, Report

Within the VIDI project ‘The Roots of Deduction’ led by Catarina Dutilh Novaes, the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen is advertising a 12-month post-doc position, to commence in January 2015 or shortly thereafter. Given the broad scope of the project, candidates with a number of different backgrounds will be considered, as long … Continue reading Post-doc in Groningen: The Roots of Deduction

Bored by small powers of 2? You can now play 2048, but with large cardinals instead. For the long version, you have to get all the way to 0=1. Fork by Chris Le Sueur, h/t David Schrittesser

The SEP finally has an entry on Jan Łukasiwicz, by Peter Simons: Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956) was a Polish logician and philosopher who introduced mathematical logic into Poland, became the earliest founder of the Warsaw school of logic, and one of the principal architects and teachers of that school. His most famous achievement was to give … Continue reading SEP Entry on Łukasiewicz

Helmut Veith and I are organizing a special session at the Logic Colloquium in Vienna.  The panelists will be Byron Cook (Microsoft Research), Alexander Leitsch (University of Technology Vienna), Prakash Panangaden (McGill University), Nicole Schweikardt (Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main). The abstract copied from the ASL Committee on logic Education page: Logic has been called the … Continue reading The Place of Logic in Computer Science Education

Wow. Learn something new every day. a) BASIC just turned 50 years old four days ago. b) You know who invented BASIC? John G. Kemeny, student of Alonzo Church, and the guy who's credited with first defining the now-standard notion of truth in a model! (Kemeny was apparently also a great president at Dartmouth, opening … Continue reading Did You Know Who Invented BASIC!?

Please add your favorite Frege joke in comments (or tweet @RrrichardZach with #fregejokes hashtag). Doesn't have to be good. In fact, just any logic joke is fine.

Check out the funded doctoral program in logic in computer science! http://logic-cs.at/phd/ TU Wien, TU Graz, and JKU Linz are seeking exceptionally talented and motivated students for their joint doctoral program LogiCS. The LogiCS doctoral college focuses on interdisciplinary research topics covering (i) computational logic, and applications of logic to (ii) databases and artificial intelligence … Continue reading Funded PhD Positions in Vienna (Logic in CS)

The LaTeX package bussproofs.sty for typesetting natural deduction/sequent calculus proofs is nifty especially for its nice alignment of sequents.  By contrast to the proof.sty package, it doesn't allow you to typeset missing parts of a proof, though. proofs.sty has the \deduce command for that; it typesets vertical dots instead of a horizontal inference line. I … Continue reading bpextra: entire deductions in bussproofs.sty

All-around awesome logician colleagues and friends Steve Awodey and Jeremy Avigad have netted a $7.5m, 5-year grant to develop Homotopy Type Theory! http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2014/april/april28_awodeygrant.html http://homotopytypetheory.org/2014/04/29/hott-awarded-a-muri/

Conflicts with Vienna Summer of Logic, but very interesting: From http://cicm-conference.org/2014/cicm.php?event=nop&menu=general We have already witnessed the moment where chess-playing computers have surpassed humans. It might seem to be only a matter of time that computers will also surpass humans in mathematical theorem proving. In fact, the traditional notion of mathematical proof faces in the beginning … Continue reading Workshop on The Notion of Proof

CfP from http://sotfom.wordpress.com: Set theory is taken to serve as a foundation for mathematics. But it is well-known that there are set-theoretic statements that cannot be settled by the standard axioms of set theory. The Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms, with the Axiom of Choice (ZFC), are incomplete. The primary goal of this symposium is to explore the … Continue reading Extended Deadline! CFP: Symposium on the Foundations of Mathematics

US$25,000 for 4 months (September 2015 or January 2016) Contact: Brad Hector, Fulbright Canada Program Officer (Scholars) The University of Calgary is pleased to offer the opportunity for a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Logic or the Philosophy of Science. The visiting researcher will be a part of the Department of Philosophy and collaborate with a dynamic research … Continue reading Visiting Research Chair in Logic or Philosophy of Science at the University of Calgary

The Association for Computing Machinery has awarded the 2013 Turing Award (the Computer Science equivalent of the Nobel Prize Fields Medal Schock Prize) to Leslie Lamport at Microsoft Research for his work on formal specification and verification techniques, specifically the Temporal Logic of Actions and his work on fault tolerance in distributed systems. Not as … Continue reading Leslie Lamport wins Turing Award

Today's the last of three lectures on Gentzen's second proof of the consistency of PA in my proof theory course. a) Still looking for good resources on ordinal notations, esp., $latex <\epsilon_0$, especially around the question how one can "see" that they are well-ordered without mentioning that they are order-isomorphic to $latex \epsilon_0$  Takeuti has … Continue reading Constructive Ordinals and the Consistency of PA