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On the Unusual Effectiveness of Logic in Computer Science
In 2001, Moshe Vardi organised a workshop devoted to a the topic of The Unusual Effectiveness of Logic in Computer Science with papers presented covering such topics as "Logic as the calculus of computer science" (Vardi) and "Descriptive complexity" (Immerman), and later a gang consisting of Halpern, Harper, Immerman, Kolaitis, Vardi, and Vianu published a likewise named 24 page article in the July 2002 issue of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic.
The title is derived from Wigner's famous article on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, which was devoted to raising and attempting to answer the important question: why should mathematics have been so useful to natural scientists? With respect to logic, my answer for the effectiveness of LICS is that, while computation is a physical phenomenon, it is a phenomenon that is best understood via powerful abstractions, and the most powerful abstractions we have at the moment are abstractions in mathematical logic, because of the fundamental relationship of Turing completeness to Goedelian incompleteness. Links derived from Richard Zach's Motivating Intro Logic for Philosophy majors (and others). |
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