World Logic Day Event: What Came First, Math or Computing?

Moshe Y. Vardi, University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University

Talk with reception to follow. Remote participation will be available via Zoom. The link will be sent to those who RSVP. RSVP: https://vardi.eventbrite.com

ABSTRACT: One of the most famous questions in the philosophy of mathematics is whether mathematics is discovered or invented. As Timothy Gowers wrote: “It has been asked over and over again, and it is not clear what would constitute a satisfactory answer.”

In this talk, I will address this question from the perspective of a computer scientist. I will argue that the developments of mathematics and computing has dovetailed each other for thousands of years: Computing begat math, and math begat computing. Furthermore, both are connected to the real world via one of the most amazing faculties of the human mind: the capacity to abstract.

BIO: Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. His research focuses on the interface of mathematical logic and computation — including database theory, hardware/software design and verification, multi-agent systems, and constraint satisfaction. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Knuth Prize, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, and the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award. He is the author and co-author of over 750 papers, as well as two books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow as well as fellow of several societies, and a member of several academies, including the US National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science, and the Royal Society of London. He holds nine honorary titles. He is a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing.

This talk is being held in conjunction with World Logic Day. The proclamation of World Logic Day by UNESCO, in association with the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPSH), intends to bring the intellectual history, conceptual significance and practical implications of logic to the attention of interdisciplinary science communities and the broader public.

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