Yearly Archives: 2008
LaTeX for Logicians
Just to report that there’s now an smarter, updated, port of the old LaTeX for Logicians pages now available at my composite website www.logicmatters.net. All corrections and further contributions very gratefully received. (Another pre-term task ticked off the list!)
Online logic texts resources
In case you missed this over at Richard Zach’s blog, here’s a link to an excellent page by Henri Galinon which in turn links to freely available logic texts and surveys of various kinds. Very well worth checking out. [Link … Continue reading
iTunes: why?
Life has been more than a bit distracting for the last few weeks. So apart from stuff that has had to be done — revising some lectures for the beginning of term, and putting together some thoughts for the first … Continue reading
Mathematics and games, again
OK, I’ve had a chance to get back to wrestling with Sec. 108 of the Big Typescript. So here’s a draft handout for the first seminar of term — mostly for third year undergrads and beginning post-grads (so this is … Continue reading
If you were a set
Amazon’s algorithm for telling you about books they think you might find interesting (given your past purchases) can deliver some amusing results. “Greetings,” they say today, “we’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Classical Recursion Theory: The Theory of Functions … Continue reading
Mathematics and games
Of course, the trouble with tackling Wittgenstein is you can bogged down so easily and distracted into various kinds of detective work (sometimes I wonder if half the attraction the sage has for some of his less critical fans is … Continue reading
On the irritation of reading Wittgenstein
I’ve got to another sticky point in Parsons’s book (some irritating obscurity), and am a bit stumped to know what to think. But I’ll return to that in due course. In the meantime, one other thing I’ve started doing in … Continue reading
Things
A while back I posted about trying the OmniFocus ‘task management’ software which implements Getting Things Done type lists. As I said, it’s not that I haven’t tasks to do, and the GTD idea really does work. But, having played … Continue reading
Blackburn vs Polkinghorne
In my post about the LHC, I mentioned John Polkinghorne (that’s the Reverend Professor Sir John Polkingorne to you). He taught me quantum mechanics a long time ago, and he was a terrific lecturer and expositor. Since then, he’s become … Continue reading
Parsons’s Mathematical Thought: Secs 31, 32, Numbers as objects
Chapter 6 of Parsons’s book is titled ‘Numbers as objects’. So: what are the natural numbers, how are they “given” to us, are they objects available to intuition in the kinds of ways suggested in the previous chapter? Sec. 31 … Continue reading