Category: Uncategorized
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Eight Logicians Elected to the American Academy
The American Academy of Arts & of Sciences has announced its 2015 class of members. The recipients of this prestigious honor include eight logicians: Sanjeev Arora (Computer Science, Princeton University) works in complexity theory, and is especially known for his work on probabilistically checkable proofs. He previously won the Gödel Prize for his work on…
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Anita Burdman Feferman, 1927-2015
Anita Burdman Feferman, the noted biographer of Jean van Heijenoort and Alfred Tarski, died on April 9. She was the author of Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort (Jones and Bartlett, 1993, reprinted as From Trotsky to Gödel, CRC Press, 200) and the co-author of Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (CUP, 2004). …
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Finding Cheryl’s Birthday with DEMO
Following up on the Dynamic Epistemic Logic treatment of Cheryl’s Birthday Puzzle, Malvin Gattinger (ILLC Amsterdam) has formalized the problem in DEMO_S5, a Dynamic Epistemic Logic model checker written in Haskell by Jan van Eijck (CWI Amsterdam and ILLC). The original DEMO system was described in: Jan van Eijck: “DEMO—a demo of epistemic modelling” In: Johan…
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Mancosu on Frege and Direction
Remember the part in Frege’s Grundlagen where he starts to talk about abstraction by talking about the direction of lines? Two lines have the same direction if and only if they are parallel; this gives an identity criterion for directions of lines. Ever wondered why Frege starts bringing in geometry? What the historical context and…
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Ask Your Librarian to Subscribe to PhilPapers!
PhilPapers now has almost 1.75 million entries. Like the Stanford Encyclopedia, the project is non-profit and largely run by volunteers. In order to be sustainable, they do need funding. And like the Stanford Encyclopedia, they are asking for our help: so ask your library to subscribe! The merger of Philosophy Research Index into PhilPapers has…
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Logicians Yap, Kooi Explain Viral Birthday Logic Puzzle
You’ve probably seen the “birthday logic puzzle” that’s gone viral in the past few days. If you haven’t, you might want to try to solve it yourself. Here it is: Two dynamic epistemic logicians, Audrey Yap (UVic) and Barteld Kooi (Groningen) explained the solution (and how to get it) on facebook. “Dynamic” here modifies “epistemic”,…
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Logic without Borders: Essays in Honor of Jouko Väänänen
A Festschrift for Jouko Väänänen‘s 60th birthday is now out with de Gruyter, edited by Åsa Hirvonen, Juha Kontinen, Roman Kossak, and Andrés Villaveces: In recent years, mathematical logic has developed in many directions, the initial unity of its subject matter giving way to a myriad of seemingly unrelated areas. The articles collected here, which…
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Moshe Vardi Elected Fellow of SIAM
SIAM just announced its list of Fellows for 2015, and it includes Moshe Vardi. The citation reads: Moshe Y. Vardi is Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University. He is being recognized for contributions to the development of logic as…
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Quine’s Paradox and Gödel’s Theorem
It’s a commonplace to compare Gödel’s theorem to the liar paradox: The sentence This sentence is not true. is neither true nor false. Switch out “provable” for “true” and you get This sentence is not provable. and, modulo some technical stuff, this sentence is then neither provable nor refutable. But of course the “modulo some…
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My Sessions at the Pacific
I’m organizing two sessions at the Pacific APA; please join me there! Thursday, April 2, morning, 9-noon: 4A Book Symposium: Greg Frost-Arnold, Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard: Conversations on Logic, Mathematics, and Science Speakers: Richard Creath (Arizona State University) Gary Ebbs (Indiana University Bloomington) Greg Lavers (Concordia University) Greg Frost-Arnold (Hobart and William Smith…