But it was hot too. Last week I visited Oftersheim, Germany in order to see meine Mutter. It’s a small town just a bit south of Mannheim and Heidelberg. My lady came with me, and as luck would have it, my sister was able to travel over from Boston the same time [...]

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics hosted a conference last month on a topic which is very much at the intersection of physics and philosophy: the nature of laws of nature. Carnegie Mellon Philosophy’s own Kevin Kelly was there to give a talk related to one of his favorite pet subjects, Ockham’s razor.
Scientific American’s [...]

I just stumbled across a cornucopia of Quine videos on YouTube. Specifically, they are videos coming from this series. From the looks of things, nothing from the Boolos, Dreben or Dennett panels is up on YouTube. But the Fara interview, as well as the Block, Fogelin and Goldfarb panels, are all there. [...]

I have (very) recently gotten into the study of algorithmic randomness, and figure that airing some things out here on the blog might do me some good. I will not be providing an in-depth introduction to the fundamentals of the area here. What I will do in this post is give some basic [...]

Here’s something I just read about over at LogBlog. It’s a graphic novel with a logical focus, written by Apostolos Doxiadis (author of the mathematically-tinged 1992 novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture) and computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.
Papadimitriou might be best known to logicians from his textbook with Harry Lewis on the theory of computation. [...]

My advisor and I are currently crafting plans for a book focusing on Dedekind’s style of mathematics and the manner in which things like Galois theory and algebraic number theory evolved in his hands. Part of the book would consist of some translations (with commentary) of pieces by Dedekind.
I’ve just put a draft of [...]

Over at Terence Tao’s blog, the Fields medalist produces prodigious volumes of posts; some detail his major research work, some are course lecture notes, and then some are expository bits that he writes up for his own edification. I just noticed a post from April about Gödel’s completeness and compactness theorems. From a [...]

In a recent joint paper with Jeremy Avigad and John Mumma (forthcoming in the Review of Symbolic Logic, preprint available at the arXiv), we devise a formal system that is intended to faithfully capture the notion of Euclidean geometric proofs. Specifically, is meant to be a formal counterpart to Books I through [...]

To get the blog rolling, here’s something I came across in my recent reading.
My old advisor Peter Koellner, in a paper on pluralism in mathematics, raises the kind of interesting point (based on a simple observation) that I’m often disappointed didn’t occur to me already. The main issue Koellner is considering is the problem [...]