Ada Lovelace Day 2025

 

 

 Phew! I almost completely missed it! This year's Ada Lovelace heroes are Larisa Maksimova and Ewa Orlowska. Someone once said (and I repeated it dozens of times in talks and in writing) that starting a project is easy; difficult is keeping it up, year after year.  Maintenance is much harder than starting new things. It's not sexy, I can be very boring. I seem to be falling prey to this difficulty now. I have been doing Ada Lovelace Day posts since 2011. Nowadays it should be easier, since I can decide what I want to be working on. But instead it is turning harder: focusing on projects and finishing them off turns out harder if you make your own deadlines.

Anyways, as usual, better late than never. This year, I went back to basics and chose two mathematical logicians, as it was the original goal.  When I was growing up, I had the impression that many logicians, especially from the Iron Curtain countries, were women. They seemed established professionals; they looked much older than the corresponding authors from the West. They also morphed into a jumbled mass in my head. Now I realize the huge differences in subjects, approaches, cultures, etc.  Now I feel that I should try to learn the history of logic/mathematics and its nuances, checking out all the manipulations of  the winners, who write the (lack of) history. (Yes, we have a project on history of Mathematics in the BRICS countries, I have much to learn from my historian friends.) Anyways, here goes the two heroes of 2025:

 Larisa Lvovna Maksimova (5 November 1943 – 4 April 2025) was a Russian mathematical logician known for her research in non-classical logic. Sergei Odintsov (kudos to him!) edited  Larisa Maksimova on Implication, Interpolation, and Definability, Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol. 15,  2018, a festschrift for her. I just bought the book and I hope to learn what she was doing with strict implication!

But to end on a positive note, the second hero is Stella Ewa Orłowska (born 1935),  a Polish logician. Her research centers on the concept that everything in logic and set theory can be expressed in terms of relations, and has used this idea to publish works on deduction systems and model theory for non-classical logic, and logics of non-deterministic and incomplete information. 

Professor  Orłowska has many  books under her name. She also has a festschrift book, pictured below. Just as well, as I could not find a picture of her today. But I do remember seeing several pictures in previous years. According to Google Scholar  professor Orłowska has a 2025 arxiv paper, joint work with Viktor Marek and Ivo Düntsch on Rough Sets. Wonderful to hear!