This completely self-contained study, widely considered the best book in the field, is intended to serve both as an introduction to quantification theory and as ...
This book presents a systematic, unified treatment of fixed points as they occur in Godels incompleteness proofs, recursion theory, combinatory logic, semantics, and metamathematics. Packed with instructive problems and solutions, the book offers an excellent introduction to the subject and highlights recent research.
The Tao Is Silent Is Raymond Smullyan's beguiling and whimsical guide to the meaning and value of eastern philosophy to westerners. "To me," Writes Smullyan, "Taoism means a state of inner serenity combined with an intense aesthetic awareness. Neither alone is adequate; a purely passive serenity is kind of dull, and an anxiety-ridden awareness is not very appealing." This is more than a book on Chinese philosophy. It is a series of ideas inspired by Taoism that treats a wide variety (...) of subjects about life in general. Smullyan sees the Taoist as "one who is not so much in search of something he hasn't, but who is enjoying what he has." Readers will be charmed and inspired by this witty, sophisticated, yet deeply religious author, whether he is discussing gardening, dogs, the art of napping, or computers who dream that they're human. (shrink)
In this entertaining and challenging collection of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan-author of Forever Undecided-continues to delight and astonish us with his gift for making available, in the thoroughly pleasurable form of puzzles, some of the most important mathematical thinking of our time.
Generally speaking, it appears correct to say that in a formulation of first order logic in which a large number of connectives are taken as primitive which allows us to have our cake and eat it too.
This work is a sequel to the author's Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, though it can be read independently by anyone familiar with Godel's incompleteness theorem for Peano arithmetic. The book deals mainly with those aspects of recursion theory that have applications to the metamathematics of incompleteness, undecidability, and related topics. It is both an introduction to the theory and a presentation of new results in the field.
An entertaining series of logic problems and puzzles of increasing difficulty, and all relating important mathematical and logical concepts, includes mind-benders, paradoxes, metapuzzles, number exercises, and a mathematical novel.
This article is written for both the general mathematican and the specialist in mathematical logic. No prior knowledge of metamathematics, recursion theory or combinatory logic is presupposed, although this paper deals with quite general abstractions of standard results in those three areas. Our purpose is to show how some apparently diverse results in these areas can be derived from a common construction. In Section 1 we consider five classical fixed point arguments (or rather, generalizations of them) which we present as (...) problems that the reader might enjoy trying to solve. Solutions are given at the end of the section. In Section 2 we show how all these solutions can be obtained as special cases of a single fixed point theorem. In Section 3 we consider another generalization of the five fixed point results of Section 1 and show that this is of the same strength as that of Section 2. In Section 4 we show some curious strengthenings of results of Section 3 which we believe to be of some interest on their own accounts. (shrink)
Self-referential sentences have played a key role in Tarski's proof [9] of the non-definibility of arithmetic truth within arithmetic and Gödel's proof [2] of the incompleteness of Peano Arithmetic. In this article we consider some new methods of achieving self-reference in a uniform manner.
Some new double analogues of induction and transfinite recursion are given which yields a relatively simple proof of a result of Robert Cowen, [2] which in turn is a strengthening of an earlier result of Smullyan [1], which in turn gives a unified approach to Zorn's Lemma, the transfinite recursion theorem and certain results about ordinal numbers.
Eighty paradoxes, logical lobyrinths, and intriguing enigmas progress from light fables and fancies to challenging Zen exercises and a novella and probe the timeless questions of philosophy and life.
Puzzles of logic involve knights, knaves, gods, demons, and mortals, and Inspector Craig conducts a summer-long adventure in combinatory logic, basic to computer science and artificial intelligence.
