Logic, philosophy of mathematics, and related topics.
As announced, I am beginning to revise the 2022 Beginning Mathematical Logic . Here is the first updated chapter, of recommended (and not-so-recommended) readings on standard First Order Logic . All comments, corrections, suggestions will of course be very welcome.
A month full of distractions, fatigue, brain fog. Great. But it has made one thing clear. It wouldn’t be wise for the time being to embark (or continue) on a large-scale project like a new edition of the Gödel book or of my intro logic text. What I need are some relatively unchallenging small-scale projects as rival distractions. Such as revising some of the individual chapters of Beginning…
There have been considerable distractions … So I have had less time and inclination for logical matters in the last couple of weeks. And much less patience too. I did, for example, look at a recent Cambridge Elements on logic; but it struck me as really very badly written. I also, for example, found myself struggling though a couple of recent papers by an author I have admired; again, this…
On a very hot night, when it must have been so hard to keep the gut strings in tune, a Wigmore Hall concert with the always wondrous Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble singing and playing Handel. The direct link to the Wigmore site is here , and the page also links to the programme details. If you haven’t done so before, you may need to register for free to see the video. It is…
Back from six days in Ljubljana. Very hot – too hot to want to pause long to take carefully composed photos! So this is just a quick glipse of the long riverside walk that runs through the centre of the city. We were there mostly to hang out with the Digital Nomad Daughter, and the heat restricted the amount of exploration we felt like doing. But from what we saw, Ljubljana seems a delightful…
Two apologies are in order. First, those clicking on saved links pointing to Logic Matters will often have been getting “Page not found” errors since the site moved to GitHub. This was inevitable, given that the ramshackle old folder structure got cleaned up in the move, so URLs for many particular pages will have changed. But what was not inevitable is that I didn’t have the gumption (until…
I am thinking about recommendations for the Study Guide for readings on first-order logic, and it has been a while since I looked at the offering from the admirable Open Logic Project. So here’s a draft of a new book note. Introduction The Open Logic Project offers an “open-source, modular, collaboratively authored collection of teaching materials for formal (meta)logic and formal methods,…
The domain name logicmatters.net now points to this new site freely hosted on GitHub. Which has all been quick! It has indeed been quite a fun, fast, mildly nerdy, journey from the old WordPress site. So here are brief notes about the state of play as the site settles in (though sensible readers will probably want to skip straight on to the terrific new Pavel Haas Quartet video linked below). As…
As promised, a hardback of Introducing Category Theory was published on June 1st, and is beginning to appear listed on booksellers’ online sites – search with the ISBN 106834671X. It looks pleasing enough, though the Amazon-only paperback is if anything nicer. But the hardback is intended for libraries. Yes, of course, the book is freely available online. But many do find working from a five…
I said a week or so ago that I was going to investigate moving the Logic Matters website from its current expensively hosted Wordpress incarnation to a (slimmer?) version hosted for free on GitHub. With a lot of help from Gemini and Claude I have a working version up and running, which you are now reading! Check it out: all comments most welcome. I will no doubt tinker with the look and feel of…
The Logic Matters blog started on 9 March 2006. Bother! – I missed its twentieth birthday. Raise a belated glass, as that was a milestone of sorts. I do plan to continue with the blog and website, maybe in a less active way. But I am going to experiment (initially in a local sandbox) with moving from having an expensively hosted WordPress site to using a Static Site Generator like Quarto for a…
There have been so many moving obituaries and fond tributes. Here, to mark her passing, is Felicity Lott at the start of her stellar career, singing Pamina at Glyndebourne, almost fifty years ago. How joyous. And there was, by the way, a wonderful episode of This Cultural Life on the BBC a few days ago , a conversation with Felicity Lott, broadcast the day before she died: a life well lived.
The revised/corrected third edition of Introducing Category Theory is now available as a paperback. To keep the cost minimal, this is again via print-on-demand from Amazon US , Amazon UK , and of course other Amazons too, with ISBN 1068346728. There are many corrections of typos, and quite a few minor expositional improvements. Is it worth getting the new paperback if you already have the January…
What have I learnt over recent weeks, preparing a corrected version of Introducing Category Theory , invoking – at various stages – my friends Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT as proof-reading assistants? Not very helpfully, the take-home message is that LLMs are both extremely useful and also surprisingly bad at proof-reading. To explain … Let me backtrack. At the beginning of the year I called a halt…
The end is in sight. I have just uploaded another PDF of Introducing Category Theory (now identified as Version 3.4 on the verso of the title page – you might need to clear your brower’s cache to force a download of the latest, greatest, version). Never say never, but I hope no further significant changes will be needed before I set up a paperback version. Fingers crossed. I have yet to do a final…
A very interesting new blog post by Tim Gowers on his recent experiences with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro. A headline: “I would judge the level of the result that ChatGPT found in under two hours to be that of a perfectly reasonable chapter in a combinatorics PhD.” Well worth reading. Added . Of the comments to Gowers’ post, the most sensible I have so far seen is this one by Chad Topaz. Daniel M Gessell…
The Victorian floor of my tiny study slopes and dips quite badly and it would have been expensive to engineer a flat, level, surface. So, to finish the redecoration, it has had to be new carpet. No majolica tiles for me. Not like this one (now in the Fitzwilliam Museum), from the series which Isabella d’Este used in her stu dio lo . As I said, when first back to work in my own much improved stu…
I am still working again through the third edition of the category theory book, correcting typos in the first printed version (fortunately, relatively few are possibly misleading), correcting thinkos (cheeringly not many), rewording a few too-contorted sentences (again pleasingly few), slightly improving some sign-posting, and deleting a few over enthusiastic exclamation marks and the like. I’m…
Another six large-carrier bags of books have gone to Oxfam. And my tiny redecorated study is at last put together again, and – a miracle! – with no books in piles on the floor. Rather late in the day, it is the nicest-looking room I have ever had. The Morris paper is a real delight. A new dim-out blind works a treat, radically reducing distracting reflections in my large Apple monitor. Gemini has…
With my mind partly on revising the Study Guide, I have been browsing through three relatively recently published logic books. None of them impress as candidates for self-study. I will be brief (unfairly? life is short …). Robert André’s Set Theory: An Introduction to Axiomatic Reasoning was published at an outrageous price by CRC Press in 2025. The world is not short of attractively written,…