Modern Mathematical Logic

Mathematical Logic for Computer Science is a mathematics textbook with theorems and proofs, but the choice of topics has been guided by the needs of students of computer science. The method of semantic tableaux provides an elegant way to teach logic that is both theoretically sound and easy to understand. The uniform use of tableaux-based techniques facilitates learning advanced logical systems based on what the student has learned from elementary systems.

This book grew out of lectures. It is intended as an introduction to classical two-valued predicate logic. The restriction to classical logic is not meant to imply that this logic is intrinsically better than other, non-classical logics; however, classical logic is a good introduction to logic because of its simplicity, and a good basis for applications because it is the foundation of classical mathematics, and thus of the exact sciences which are based on it.

This is a short, modern, and motivated introduction to mathematical logic for upper undergraduate and beginning graduate students in mathematics and computer science. Any mathematician who is interested in getting acquainted with logic and would like to learn Gödel’s incompleteness theorems should find this book particularly useful.