Hi,
Le 15-janv.-08, ŕ 15:56, Bruno Marchal a écrit :
> That's a very nice book indeed. And in the same vein (and price) there
> is "5000 BC", quite interesting (and taoist) too.
> Smullyan is dead, ....
Günther Greindl made kindly the remark to me that he didn't find any
confirmation of this on the net, and I don' find any either.
Some people told me he passed away since about two years and I thought
everybody knew. Now I realize this is probably false.
Big apology to all who care and love him.
If anyone has better information, please tell us.
Searching for logicians who passed away I discover the sad news (in
more than one place on the net) that Torkel Franzen died in 2006. I
really would like to say that his two books around incompleteness are
imo very excellent. I share with him, (and the logician Macintyre who
made a talk on this point recently in Brussels), the idea that most of
usual mathematics is already in the grip of Peano Arithmetic.
Reference, and the first chapter of his "inexhaustibility " book is
available here:
http://www.sm.luth.se/%7Etorkel/eget/progps.html
Same for his book on the abuse of Godel's theorem:
http://www.sm.luth.se/%7Etorkel/eget/tic.html
I will say more on both Torkel's books and also on Smullyan's 5000 BC
soon. Note that Smullyan has also written a biography : "A paradoxical
Life", which is also a puzzle book (!), with many funny anecdotes. You
can search inside:
http://www.amazon.com/Some-Interesting-Memories-Paradoxical-Life/dp/
1888710101
Again, big apology, I feel ashamed for leaking so bad and in all
appearance wrong information about Ray, sorry. I wish him the best.
Bruno
> and I am not sure I will ever know if Raymond Smullyan was aware of
> the computationalist links between his technical books in
> self-reference logic, and his more "philosophical" writings. One of
> his last books "Who Knows?" seems to me to witness he was not really
> aware of those links, and not so much open to the comp hyp or even
> Church's thesis, but who knows?
>
> After all, in 5000 BC he said about Mechanism that a self-pessimist
> could say "I am a machine? what a pity, I knew I was not much: bad
> news for me", and a self-optimist could say "Me? A machine? this shows
> machine can be as much as I am: good news for them". ... Something
> like that.
>
> Talking about Smullyan's books, I recall that "Forever Undecided" is a
> recreational (but ok ... not so easy, nor really recreational)
> introduction to the modal logic G (the one Solovay showed to be a
> sound and complete theory for the Godel-Lob (Gödel, Löb, or Goedel,
> Loeb) provability/concistency logic. G is the key for the math in the
> TOE approach I am developing. The logic G is the entry for all
> arithmetical "Plotinian Hypostases".
> Search on Knight and/or Knaves in the archive for preceding discussion
> about Smullyan's "Forever Undecided", and references.
>
> I must say I love also very much his "How to Mock a Mocking Bird?",
> which is a rather good introduction (imo) to the SK-combinators.
>
> Bruno
>
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
> >
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Sun Jan 20 2008 - 09:22:58 PST