Category: Uncategorized

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…