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Yesterday’s mail contained my copy of Logicomix: An Epic Search For Truth, a graphic novel by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou with art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna. It is scheduled to be released in the US on September 29, but amazon.ca apparently already had it. The UK edition is now sold out…

Here’s an interesting new-ish paper on the issue of gender differences in mathematics aptitude: Janet S. Hyde, and Janet E. Mertz. Gender, culture, and mathematics performance. PNAS vol. 106, no. 22, (June 2, 2009). Abstract: Using contemporary data from the U.S. and other nations, we address 3 questions: Do gender differences in mathematics performance exist…

Volker Peckhaus has a new entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia on the influence of Leibniz on the development of logic in the 19th century.

I got Herbert Feigl’s Theorie und Erfahrung in der Physik from the library, and on the front flyleaf there’s a handwritten dedication to Karl Menger that reads “Herrn Professor Menger ergebenst überreicht vom Verf., 13. VI. 1929.”

Wow. Four students (Sean Geggie, Martin Have, Anders Nissen, Mikkel Vester) at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, constructed a Turing Machine tape read/write assembly in LEGO. This was a final project for the course Embedded Systems – Embodied Agents, taught by Ole Caprani of the LEGO Lab at Aarhus. On their blog Lego of Doom,…

The new journal of the Association for Symbolic Logic, the Review of Symbolic Logic, started up in 2008. Two of the papers in that first volume were selected for the Philosopher’s Annual, vol 28, which each year “attempts to select the ten best papers in philosophy published in each year”. They are: Thomas Forster, The…

In response to the petitions mentioned recently, the UK government has issued an apology. The statement in full, as published on the 10 Downing St website: 2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A…

Next week it’s back to the classroom for me, and I’m teaching intro logic again. I’ve been thinking a bit about what to do on the first day, especially in the “why you should take this course” department. There’s the obvious reason: it’s required (at least for philosophy and CS majors). So I’m really talking…

Exciting new entry in the SEP on Hermann Weyl, by John Bell.

David Johnston, of the University of Victoria Philosophy Department, has just released three apps for the iPhone (and iPod Touch), which will be of interest to students (and teachers) of introductory logic courses: Logic 100 These utilities for truth-functional logic allow you to check syntax, construct truth tables, and test for consistency and validity. Notation…