Category: Applying Logics

  • The State of Modus Ponens and of Rational Discussion

    A bit of intellectual biography, prompted by a couple of days’ free time leading me to a paper written 27 years ago by a pal, which I have just read. I say a little of what’s in the paper, to encourage others to read it. And then I comment on a couple of disappointing aspects…

  • Another Glitch, Same Old Moral

    Martyn Thomas chaired a committee convened by the UK Royal Academy of Engineering on infrastructure vulnerabilities to GPS disturbances. The committee reported in March 2011 and Martyn was briefly on the front page of UK news media on March 10, 2011 until the Tohoku event happened the day after. What Martyn’s committee found was astonishing.…

  • Michael

    Michael. Everyone knew him as Michael. I was a freshman at Oxford in mathematics, interested in logic. I had been reading Chomsky in my first quarter because I had been told Chomsky had mathematised language. My tutor in algebra, Ian Macdonald (same jacket as in the picture!), an algebraic geometer, suggested I could look at…

  • John McCarthy

    John McCarthy has died. The great John McCarthy. Brilliant and entertaining, fun to be around, accessible unlike many of his stature, who carried an aura about him which blessed you with the feeling, if you came within it, that you were doing the Thinking That Really Mattered. Even if you were just flapping around at…

  • Swinburne’s Bayesian Arguments

    I recently looked through Nature’s List of Top 50 Science Blogs and ended up reading quite a lot of the Good Math, Bad Math Weblog of Mark Chu-Carroll, a computer scientist at a major industry research center who is enamoured of mathematics.The Science Top 50 Weblogs seems to be heavy on biology and the U.S.…