Logic is concerned with propositions and proofs, just as number theory is
concerned with natural numbers and operations on numbers. A proposition is an
abstract mathematical object corresponding to a declarative sentence. We
speak of the sense of a proposition and of its truth value. The thought
expressed by a proposition is its sense, and whether the proposition is true
is expressed by its truth value.
Logic deals with the truth value of propositions independently of subject
matter. The raw data of logic are sentences of natural languages or formulas
of artificial languages, but these are representations of the abstract notion
of a proposition. The truth of a proposition depends on its meaning or its
sense. Access to truth is via evidence, particularly in the form of
proof. Many rules of proof were discovered by the Greeks, and Aristotle
organized them into a logic.
The notion of proof is used also as the basis for meaning; to understand a
proposition is to know how to prove it -- although one may not know whether a
proof can be found. These are the basic concepts of logic. One can see that
they are fundamental. This course presents precise versions of these concepts
and the relationships among them.
At the turn of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell showed that there is no
single class of all propositions, so logic is concerned with subclasses of them
organized into restricted logics. Gottlob Frege introduced the idea of using
functions in the sense of mathematics to analyze the structure of propositions
into operators applied to propositional functions. This leads to the study of a
class of logics called functional or predicate calculi. According to Russell the
domains over which a propositional function are meaningful are called types. He
introduced a hierarchy of types which are used to classify functional calculi
into first-order, second-order and so forth.
First-order logic can express many theories of mathematics including Peano
arithmetic and Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory. Because most of mathematics
can be written in ZF set theory, hence most of science can be too,
first-order logic has become the focus of much research and is the logic
about which the most is known; thus it is the most studied in logic
courses. A distinct sublogic is the logic of pure propositional functions
called the propositional calculus or Boolean algebra after George Boole who
discovered it.
The concept of a formal system was introduced by David Hilbert to study logics
as mathematical objects. A formal system is essentially a system that can be
processed by a computer. Computers can check whether a string of symbols
represents a sentence and whether an expression is a legal proof? One of the
enduring topics of investigation in modern logic is what operations computers
can perform on formulas and proofs. For example, can a computer decide whether
there is a proof of a formula and find one if there is? Can a computer list all
the theorems of a logic? Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and Alfred Tarksi made
fundamental discoveries about formal logics. Gödel showed that even arithmetic
truth cannot be completely formalized, and Tarksi showed that truth of a logic
cannot in general be defined inside that logic. Church showed that computers
cannot tell whether a formula of first-order logic is provable. These results
will be stated precisely in the course, and Gödel's theorems will be studied.
L. E .J. Brouwer, Thoralf Skolem and others discovered that many propositions in
mathematics have computational meaning. Arend Heyting showed that these
propositions form the core of first-order logic and arithmetic, and that Peano
arithmetic (PA) can be factored into Heyting arithmetic (HA) and
Aristotle's axiom of excluded middle. N.G. deBruijn generalized this
computational meaning by defining a proposition as the type of its proofs.
This computational meaning can be expressed in programming languages, and Alan
Turing claimed as a "thesis" that the computational meaning of mathematics is
given precisely by Turing machines (or modern digital computers). Alonzo Church
proposed an equivalent thesis that effective computability was captured by his
lambda calculus (modern high-level programming languages) which can be
"compiled" to Turing machines as computer scientist have shown.
Computer scientists have also shown how to implement this computational core of
logics as a programming language and reasoning system combined into one
language. This was first done for a theory based on Per Martin-Lof's type
theories. Such mathematical systems form a rich class of programming logics
which have proven useful in computer science. Conversely, advances in computer
science have created a new field of mathematics called Formalized
Mathematics. This course will demonstrate these connections between computer
science and logic.
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