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As you probably know, logic pioneer Alan Turing invented the Turing machine model of computation, proved the undecidability of the halting problem and (independently of Church) the undecidability of the decision problem, and played an important role in the work at Blechley Park that broke various German ciphers during World War II. He was also…

I had to look up a Russell quote the other day, and that’s when I noticed that many of his books — including the Foundations of Geometry, Our Knowledge of the External World, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Analysis of Mind, Principles of Mathematics, Mysticism and Logic, and Principia Mathematica (annoyingly, only vol. II) — are…

Here’s another article in the “you might not have thought it but philosophy undergrads are actually doing well in careers in business and law” mold, from a Canadian perspective. Philosophy’s makeover: Why job prospects for philosophy grads are brightening, by Daniel Drolet

Ah, if it only were that simple:

A long time ago I posted on Richard Statman‘s dissertation work on the geometrical complexity of proofs: take a proof in natural deduction, interpret the formulas in it as nodes of a graph with edges going from premise to conclusion of an inference and from assumption to the (conclusion of the) inference where it is…

The BBC 4 radio program “In Our Time,” presented by Melvyn Bragg, has archives of previous features on a range of topics, including some relevant to logic. Haven’t had the time to listen to them, but it you do, let me know what you think. Might be the kind of thing you can tell your…

Exciting developments! The Association of Symbolic Logic has made the now-out of print volumes in the Lecture Notes in Logic (vols. 1-12) and Perspectives in Mathematical Logic (vols. 1-12) open-access through Project Euclid. This includes classics like Shoenfield’s Recursion Theory, Lindström’s Aspects of Incompleteness in the LNL, Sacks’ Higher Recursion Theory, Hájek and Pudlák’s Metamathematics…

Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ list of women in philosophical logic and philosophy of logic (see this earlier post) is now online. Updates over there, please!

For your amusement: a list of all countries with at least 5 members of the Association for Symbolic Logic, rank-ordered by number of logicians per 10,000,000 inhabitants. Bonus info: percentage of women logicians in these countries. Country # ASL members % Women per 10,000,000 New Zealand 17 0% 39.5 Switzerland 25 4% 32.5 Israel 22…

Catarina Dutilh Novaes sent the following important message to PHILOS-L last weekend, reposted here with her permission: Dear all, Recently (and admittedly very late!), I started thinking more seriously about the lack of gender balance in the areas in which I do most of my research, namely history and philosophy of logic and philosophical logic.…