Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Karl Sigmund has a book on the Vienna Circle (to accompany the wonderful Vienna Circle exhibition this Fall for the University of Vienna’s 650th anniversary). Sie nannten sich Der Wiener Kreis:Exaktes Denken am Rand des Untergangs is an accessible introduction to the history and context of the Vienna Circle.  You may not need such an…

[The following remarks were delivered today by Andy Arana at the beginning of a joint Paris-Davis workshop on the philosophy of mathematics, and are posted here with his permission and that of Curtis Franks.  The photo above shows Aldo at a cook-off with Marco Panza at the last instalment of that workshop series in Davis,…

My Dear Lady Byron I have received your note and should have answered no further than that I was very glad to find my apprehension (of being a party to doing mischief if I assisted Lady Lovelace’s studies without any caution) is unfounded in the opinion of yourself and Lord Lovelace, who must be better…

Ada Lovelace was born 200 years ago today.  Here’s a roundup of articles: Meet Countess Ada Lovelace, The World’s First Computer Programmer (MTV) Remembering Ada Lovelace, computer-music prognosticator (Boston Globe) Die Zahlenzauberin (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, German)

This is cool: In today’s Nature, Toby Cubitt, David Perez-Garcia, and Michael Wolf published a paper, “Undecidability of the spectral gap.” A short writeup is in Nature News, and an extended paper is on arXiv. It shows a problem in quantum physics–the spectral gap problem–to be undecidable by reducing the halting problem to it. In…

Spent today figuring out how to get LaTeX to produce interior and cover PDFs you can use with print-on-demand/self-publishing services such as Lulu and Blurb. Wrote about it at the Open Logic Project.

Our awesome students are putting on a graduate student conference next May in Calgary!  It’s right before Congress2015, i.e., the big congress of Canadian humanities & social sciences societies, which includes the Canadian Philosophical Association, the Canadian Society for the History & Philosophy of Mathematics, and the Canadian Society for the History & Philosophy of…

Rózsa Péter was one of the pioneers of recursive function theory. I wrote a short post about her for Ada Lovelace Day in 2010.  More recently, I’ve found this nice reminiscence/bio by Béla Andrásfai, a Hungarian graph theorist and Péter’s adoptive son.  I managed to track down one of his daughters, Eszter, who was so…

I came across this long-lost photograph of Jacques Herbrand in a paper by Marcel Guillaume, “La logique mathématique en France entre les deux guerres mondiales : Quelques repères,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 1/2009 (Tome 62) , p. 177-219. It turns out that the photo was taken by Natascha Artin Brunswick in 1931, when Herbrand visited Hamburg. …