[SystemSafety] Logic

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

Folks,

I have put a White Paper, The Importance of Logic in the Informatics Curriculum, up on our WWW site
at http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/WhitePapers/LogicInInformaticsCurriculum.pdf . This
makes the case for studying some formal language with an unambiguous semantics in general, and logic
in particular, in *any* informatics curriculum. It works off some key observations which some of you
have made, and a key intervention by Tobias Nipkow at TU München, who pointed me to a paper by Joe
Halpern et al on the "Unreasonable Effectiveness" of logic in informatics, published in the Bulletin
of Symbolic Logic, following the relatively well-known line of work with this phrase in the title by
Gene Wigner and Richard Hamming, about math in the natural sciences.

I wrote this paper yesterday and today so I could tell all our students to read it. A paper
summarising the discussion and affidavits that have appeared in this thread so far, in White Paper
format, will follow, contributors willing (obviously I shall ask beforehand. Contributions to the
List appear in the publicly-accessible archive, of course. Some contributors have mailed me
privately due to company requirements).

I think it is important to address such tropes as they arise (I also know that this view is not
shared by all here!). The tropes, in their guise as what it is acceptable to affirm or argue in
professional forums, affect politically what counts as good practice in our field. Both John and
Martyn have addressed in this thread what should count as good practice (not just best practice, but
good practice) and what must be present, resp. is lacking, in institutional structures (including
professional societies and informatics curricula) to assure it. In order to sort that out, the
tropes must be addressed. Those of us with employment tenure who have the inclination can do so :-)

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de