In a world of such ready e-communication, where people put work-in-progress online, where there are terrific discussion forums like FOM, not to mention blogs and the like, I do wonder about the value of so many conferences. I’m just back from one in Edinburgh on Truth and Proof: Gödel and the Foundations of Mathematics. The first conference I’d travelled to for some time, and to be honest I wasn’t really very encouraged to repeat the experience soon, good though it was to put some faces to some familiar names. In the event, only two papers were directly on Gödel, one by Richard Zach (based on the draft paper which you can read here), the other by Panu Raatikainen (based on his paper which you can read here): both interesting pieces, particularly Richard’s, but I had read them long since. Oh well, …
But Edinburgh of course was quite wonderful, not least because I got to the National Gallery of Scotland more than once. (And a happy discovery since: you can get some impression of most of their major pictures on-line, as e.g. here or here.)