Methods in Mathematical Logic

Winner of the 1983 National Book Award, The Mathematical Experience presented a highly insightful overview of mathematics that effectively conveyed its power and beauty to a large audience of mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike. The study edition of the work followed about a decade later, supplementing the original material of the book with exercises to provide a self-contained treatment usable for the classroom.

This book introduces the notions and methods of formal logic from a computer science standpoint, covering propositional logic, predicate logic, and foundations of logic programming. It presents applications and themes of computer science research such as resolution, automated deduction, and logic programming in a rigorous but readable way.

There are many kinds of books on formal logic. Some have philosophers as their intended audience, some mathematicians, some computer scien­ tists. Although there is a common core to all such books, they will be very different in emphasis, methods, and even appearance.

He [Kronecker] was, in fact, attempting to describe and to initiate a new branch of mathematics, which would contain both number theory and alge­ braic geometry as special cases.—Andre Weil [62] This book is about mathematics, not the history or philosophy of mathemat­ ics. Still, history and philosophy were prominent among my motives for writing it, and historical and philosophical issues will be major factors in determining whether it wins acceptance. Most mathematicians prefer constructive methods. Given two proofs of the same statement, one constructive and the other not, most will prefer the constructive proof. The real philosophical disagreement over the role of con­ structions in mathematics is between those—the majority—who believe that to exclude from mathematics all statements that cannot be proved construc­ tively would omit far too much, and those of us who believe, on the contrary, that the most interesting parts of mathematics can be dealt with construc­ tively, and that the greater rigor and precision of mathematics done in that way adds immensely to its value.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Relational and Algebraic Methods in Computer Science, RAMiCS 2020, held in Palaiseau, France, in April 2020.

The book covers topics spanning the period from the early days of logic programming to current times. It discusses applications to computational logic and potential applications to the integration of models of computation, knowledge representation and reasoning, and the Semantic Web. The authors develop well-known and important semantics in logic programming from a unified point of view using both order theory and new, nontraditional methods. They closely examine the interrelationships between various semantics as well as the integration of logic programming and connectionist systems/neural networks.