4th International Congress, Bucharest 1971

 

 

I have never been to Romania. I was even unsure whether the country was called Romania, Roumania or Rumania. (I have now learned that since 1975 it is Romania).

I had only known about Dracula and Transylvania and  Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu's execution, as dreadful grainy pictures in old newspapers. So I was in a bit of a bind to tell a story about this congress, as I have been writing about others.

Of course the hard information about the Congress is  available. Most of the program committee consists  of very well known logicians: P. Suppes (Chairman), A. Mostowski, A.A. Markov, M. Rabin, G. Kreisel, W. Stegmüller, K. J. J. Hintikka, A. Grünbaum, M. O. Beckner, A. N. Leontiev, P. Lazarsfeld, S. Marcus,  and M. Hesse as Section Chairmen. This way I 'discovered' the work of Mary Hasse and you should too.

I also read about the Romanian Organizing Committee: A. Joja, G. Moisil, C. Popovici (General Secretary) and wondered about how close this congress was of the taking of power by Ceaușescu. I read most about Moisil, because I like algebraic logic. But this is not a sensible blog post material here. 

So I ended up looking up the President of the Executive Committee of the Congress, Stephan Körner, The University of Bristol BS8 IRJ, England. I learned that he was the father of Tom Korner, who was one of my professors in  the Cambridge Part III course. Tom was an extremely nice professor, not only to me, but to generations of Part III students. His website gives a glimpse of his kind of self-deprecating humour, which I always enjoyed, once I was able to understand it.

Tom has some advice for people taking Part III in his website. This brought back loads of memories of my year doing Part III in Cambridge: it definitely was the hardest course I've done in my life, by a very long stretch. So it's kind of comforting that much more accomplished people than me also say so. 

Reading his advice I was reminded of a story from when I first started in Cambridge. I could read English well and I could take exams fairly well (I was accepted in most of the Mathematics departments I applied to do my Phd), but I had been thinking of going to France, where I knew a professor doing categorical model theory. Hence my spoken English was terrible and my understanding of spoken English was even worse. For a few weeks in the beginning of Part III lectures, the abbreviation (TFAE = the following are equivalent) was written in the huge blackboards
of the Mill Lane Lecture rooms over and over. Little me assumed that the letters where the initials of some very famous mathematicians, so I kept thinking to myself, these guys, who are they? They're everywhere, even more than Gauss? How come I never heard of them? Eventually the penny dropped, but I think this shows how hard that first year was.

9th International Congress, Uppsala 1991

This photo is kind of recent (Tuebingen, 2019) and I am happy that I've decided to assume that I'm really a groupie and asked Per for a joint photo! Even happier that he didn't decline. (less happy that I was looking so shabby on that day!)

But the photo serves to tell my story from the 9th Congress on Logic Methodology and Philosophy of Science that happened in Uppsala, Sweden in 1991. I had just finished my PhD and submitted a short abstract about the thesis, actually about a development of the thesis, the work with Martin Hyland on Full Intuitionistic Linear Logic (FILL). I presented my abstract thoroughly convinced that both Linear Logic and Category Theory were the best things in the world, since sliced bread, and that everyone  in the audience would know it and agree with it. When I finished, a Swedish (I assumed) professor asked me: So this is all very well, I can see that the mathematics is neat, but if this is logic, how do you explain what your "par" is to a man in the street?

Well, I didn't know to reply to him then. And I didn't know this was Professor Martin-Loef. And in some ways, I still do not know the best answer for his hard question. (I had thought he would like FILL, given FILL's commitment to intuitionistic linearity).

 Later on, when he visited Brazil, we took a long walk, chatting about logic, the universe and everything in Jardim Botanico. Prof Martin-Loef really appreciated  our Botanical Gardens and would go there everyday before doing any work at the University.  I really wish that I had had more time to ask more questions, but I had young kids to look after and I have never been very good at grabbing the right opportunities. 

 

I am hoping to use some of 2022 to think and write about the answers I have, so far. It is all about games, after all!

Twelve Days of Christmas?

 

Surely not! Christmas is done this year, unless you are in the Orthodox Church, where Christmas Eve is apparently tomorrow. But this post is  not about celebrations, religious or not, but simply about work done and how to make sure that I know what I am doing next. (ha, ha, as if!...)

In the Topos Institute we count output via submissions. This makes plenty of sense to me, as sometimes we cannot convince our peers of the elegance, beauty or usefulness of our results. One can always force oneself to submit work, but acceptance is harder.

So here is my 2021 list of Twelve Publications/Submissions (not yet rejected):

1. Godel Fibration (Davide Trotta and Matteo Spadetto) arXiv, accepted for and presented at MFCS2021

2. Dialectica Logical Principles (Davide Trotta and Matteo Spadetto) arXiv, accepted and presented at LFCS2022

3. Dialectica Petri Nets (Elena di Lavore, Wilmer Leal) arXiv,  submitted.

4. Dialectica Comonads -- invited to CALCO2021,  presented and published as LIPICS https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2021/15358/

5. ACT for Chemistry, Computing and Social Networks (Daniel Cicala, Simon Cho, Nina Otter, John Baez) -- published as AMS Notices article (February 2022)

6. Kolmogorov-Veloso Problems and Dialectica Categories (Samuel Gomes da Silva), in the book for Veloso, also arXiv (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.07854.pdf)

7. Annotation Difficulties in Natural Language Inference (Livy Real, Annebeth Buis, Katerina Kalouli, Martha Palmer) STIL2021, need to go arXiv

8. Curing the SICK and other maladies (Katerina Kalouli, Hai, Hu, Alex Webb, Larry Moss), submitted

9. Towards FRACAS-BR (Livy Real) OpenCor workshop, need to be written.

10. Duas Negações Ecumênicas (Luiz Carlos Pereira, Elaine Pimentel) chapter, appeared in De Mathematicae atque Philosophicae Elegantia: Notas Festivas para Abel Lassalle Casanave 2021 ISBN:978-1-84890-382-1

Editorships:

11. Proceedings of IMLA 2017 (Sergei Artemov)  Journal of Applied Logics - IfCoLog Journal

Volume 8, Number 8: September 2021

 https://collegepublications.co.uk/ifcolog/?00050

12. Proceedings of Linearity-TLLA 2020 (with Ugo del Lago) EPTCS 353

It's funny to look over this list and see how much more work some of these required. 

ps: Now in Feb2022 two papers were submitted: Dialectica Petri Nets (with Elena di Lavore and Wilmer Leal) and "Of Seringueiros and Sambistas: Occupation Mappings in Historical Text" (with Katerina Kalouli and Livy Real).

1st International Congress, Stanford 1960

Well, Benedikt Loewe has done a great job of finding all the official information about the DLMPS congresses. And if you're only interested in the hard, concrete facts you can make your way to  the page of Past Congresses and be done. My intention here  is to discuss the fluffy side of some of the meetings, just for fun.

The first meeting at all was the

1st International Congress of the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Stanford University 1960

• 24 August-2 September 1960, Stanford, California.
• Executive and program committees
• Publication: Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 1960 International Congress, edited by Ernest Nagel, Patrick Suppes and Alfred Tarski, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA 1962, 672 pages.
• General Assembly minutes
• Communications of the DLMPS/IUHPS ("Bulletin No. -4"): Synthese 14(4):330-340 (1962).

Now the Dept of Philosophy of Stanford has a nice history where we can read about the Suppes era, when the first congress happened. They say: 

Suppes’ indelible presence in the Department spanned sixty-four years (42 years on the full-time faculty, after which he remained deeply engaged as Emeritus Professor until his recent death in 2014). His foundational work across numerous fields in philosophy and in the sciences earned him many honors, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the National Medal of Science, and the Lakatos Award. 

First I thought my fluffy story about this conference would be the "mystery" in the preface where the editors say: Due to unforeseen circumstances, Professor Nagel was forced to resign as Chairman of the Organizing Committee just prior to the opening of the Congress, and Professor Tarski served in that capacity during its sessions.

This is good, we can conjure up a whole murder mystery on that "forced to resign", right?

But then looking at some of the papers (the book with only invited papers has 672 pages!) I discovered something much fluffier. For me at least. Here it is:

This is J. W. Addison talking about the "expanding babel of modern mathematics and logic". And bringing Hilbert into the picture to explain that Mathematics is an indivisible whole, a connected organism that as farther as it's developed, the more we can see the harmony between its parts. 

This is pink-unicorn kind of fluffy, as far as I'm concerned!

Happy New Year! 2022 is here!

 San Francisco International Airport (SFO) feels like almost home nowadays. After 23 years in the Bay Area this seems fair, but it's moving all the same. or maybe I'm just moved by the idea of New Year celebrations. Here's some Brazilian poetry about new years...

But the reason for this post is not the "genial industrialization of hope", by changing the number and making us believe that from now on, in this new year, things will be better. The Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade knows how to juxtapose the exhaustion of the end of the year and all the new hope that the changing of the year brings (and he didn't even see the pandemic in action!). This time will be different, dreams will be realized, love materialized, hope renovated--we all need to believe it and we do!

This is very interesting and sure  I need to think more about it. But this post was supposed to be about the collective Women in Logic and how to carry on our work in 2022. So the idea is to discuss the

DIVISION OF LOGIC, METHODOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

and the sixteen congresses they've organized since the first one in 1960,  at Stanford University.

But maybe we need a new post for that!

White Christmas

People don't usually remember to consider mathematics as a protector shield against bad thoughts. But it is one of its less well-known good side-effects. The son wouldn't say so, as the problems he tackles are human problems, which I find much harder and more important. But  what he said yesterday could've come straight from one of my attempts to explain the kind of mathematics I do: we seek patterns and structure, because this is the  way humans have to survive the chaos that's life.

So I recommend keeping at least one or two problems 'on the go' at all times. This, to my mind can be effective, especially in  emotionally charged situations like the holidays. All this accounting of things accomplished or not, opportunities taken or missed, goals and deadlines swashing by, can lead to cyclic feelings of inadequacy. We don't need that, we have enough work to do. Our work is cut-out for us!
 

Retrospective of 2021?

I have a bit of an issue with the Topos Institute blog: I don't like the very staid style,  stodgy and academic. I think blog posts are supposed to be fun, make jokes, have pictures. Even if they're only pictures of weeds in the corner of the garden. So I have not been writing much there. But we just had our end of the year post and this was more fun. The post is linked above and I will repeat my bit below, as I would like to add more pictures than the ones I could fit in the Topos post.

 

2021 was a very difficult year for most of us: the pandemic which looked like it was receding in the Spring (at least it looked like that in California, when the vaccine became available) came back, showing that it hasn’t been tamed. Yet, we hope. But we mourn the thousands and thousands that were taken too soon. The economic crisis, brought about in part by the pandemic, is just starting to unfold. (Economics is always a few steps behind politics: it’s much harder to tell the numbers of deaths it causes.) The climatic crisis catastrophes, not as bad as they were in California in 2020, are still very much with us: we have droughts, wildfires, floods, you name it…

Against this backdrop of suffering, it feels almost inconsiderate to think that I am working exactly on what I wanted to for so many years. It feels good to tell people that the Topos mission is to “shape technology for public benefit by advancing sciences of connection and integration”. And it is great to have similarly minded people to do it with! Topos is still starting, but we believe in community, diversity, equity and inclusion; and we’re working for that. 

 

The challenges are enormous: they go from curbing the arrogance of mathematicians and tech people who think they know how to do others’ work better than themselves, to convincing biologists, social scientists, and humanities researchers that we can bring something to the table, in a respectful manner. But if the challenges are considerable, the payoff is incredible. We hope not only “To invent the future” (as in a previous place), but to invent a just, sustainable and equitable future for us all. Thank you for all the joint work, friends!!

Both Davide and Matteo (far above) and Elena and Wilmer  (just above) are presenting our joint work at SYCO  (Symposium on Compositional Structures) tomorrow and the next day. Good luck friends!

Now this is just one slice of the work. Below to the left, we have our little annotation on NLI group: Katerina, Martha, Annebeth and Livy. To the right Elaine talking at the meeting about 'Women in Logic in Brazil 2019'. 

 

 Now there are several other people that I should be adding pictures of in here. Amongst others Luiz Carlos Pereira, Samuel Gomes da Silva, Jacob Collard and Eswaran Subrahmanian. But I am very tired now, so just one more group picture.

Happy Holidays!