Category: Uncategorized

The University of Calgary is moving its websites to a Content Management System (Drupal, to be specific). My homepage is scheduled to be migrated tonight. Now, I’ve tried very hard to not break any URLs or links (the IT people probably hate me by now), but there will be some changes. For instance, all the…

TYPES Summer School 2007Proofs of Programs and Formalisation of Mathematics August 19-31 2007, Bertinoro, Italy http://TypesSummerSchool07.cs.unibo.it During the last ten years major achievements have been made in using computers for interactive proof developments to produce secure software and to show interesting mathematical results. Recent major results are, for instance, the complete formalisation of a proof…

Paul Cohen died on Friday of a rare lung disease. This came over FOM today: We are very sorry to tell you that Paul Cohen has suddenly passed away. He has had a rare lung disease for maybe two years now, but symptoms only began to really manifest about a year ago. We did not…

Mark Lance posted this insightful message to FOM yesterday, in response to this thread on “progress in philosophy”: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under “things in the broadest possible sense” I…

Alasdair Urquhart was nice enough to identify the model that’s dominating the lounge at BIRS. It’s an icosidodecahedral prismatohexacosihecatonicosachoron, and is made of 120 icosidodecahedra, 600 cuboctahedra, 720 pentagonal prisms, its faces are 3600 triangles, 3600 squares, 1440 pentagons, and it has 10,800 edges. I’m sure it’s got something to do with E8 (the mapping…

My colleague Marc has updated his SEP entry on Species. Jon Willimason is starting a new online thing called The Reasoner. The Reasoner is a monthly digest highlighting exciting new research on reasoning and interesting new arguments. It is interdisciplinary, covering research in, e.g., philosophy, logic, AI, statistics, cognitive science, law, psychology, mathematics and the…

Ok, I wasn’t really attacked so much as passed by. Anyway, the slides for my talk at the Annual Meeting are here.

Thanks to Greg for (almost) liveblogging the Banff workshop on Mathematical Methods in Philosophy. So go to Greg’s blog to find out what happened!

In his talk this morning, Grisha Mints referred to a paper by Paul Cohen. He didn’t have the reference handy, so I tracked it down: Paul J. Cohen, Skolem and pessimism about proof in mathematics. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2005) 363, 2407–2418. The entire issue, on meeting on “The nature of mathmatical proof” organized…

Just in case you ever need it: \ddots going the other direction: \makeatletter\def\Ddots{\mathinner{\mkern1mu\raise\p@ \vbox{\kern7\p@\hbox{.}}\mkern2mu \raise4\p@\hbox{.}\mkern2mu\raise7\p@\hbox{.}\mkern1mu}}\makeatother Then you can say: \varepsilon_0= \omega^{\omega^{\Ddots}}