The Raymond Smullyan Society

https://www.raymondsmullyan.com

by a4isms • 4 years ago

75 19 4 years ago

a4isms• 4 years ago

The logician, concert pianist, Taoist, and magician Raymond Smullyan has always been of interest to computer scientists. Besides being a polymath, he had Feynman's knack for being able to explain complex subjects in an accessible way.

In Raymond's case, via puzzles that unfolded ideas in recursion, infinity, Gödel's theories, logic, and more.

The Raymond Smullyan Society was formed to preserve his work, and it has just launched this web site.

leephillips2• 4 years ago

Fantastic. I suggest an RSS feed, so that I (for one) will know when new material is added.

smulloni2• 4 years ago

Especially since it would truly be an "RSS" feed.

cafard• 4 years ago

Nice. I recently bought a copy of his First-Order Logic, which is slim but dense.

selimthegrim2• 4 years ago

I was reading a review of it in Mathematics magazine recently.

selimthegrim2• 4 years ago

My bad, it was a review of A Beginner's Guide to Mathematical Logic, in American Mathematical Monthly.

eointierney• 4 years ago

Got it upstairs and it's a treasure. Such a beautiful attitude and joyful playfulness shared with real generosity.

pasquinelli2• 4 years ago

iirc, his philosophy as a teacher was to give his students as much as he could while asking as little as possible from them. refreshingly at odds with most teachers i've had.

carapace• 4 years ago

I suspect that Smullyan was one of those sages who attained enlightenment by pure thought.

paulpauper• 4 years ago

Running on mind

mbustamanter• 4 years ago

In high school I had a Philosophy class, and its book [0] had chapters in which their endings short stories. Two of the chapters (5: Learning and Intelligence, 14: Reality) had interesting excerpts from Smullyan's books Alice in Puzzle-land [1] and Five Thousand B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies [2], respectively. They highlight philosophical concepts in a way that makes them sort of 'self-explanatory', especially for a beginner student. He also has a textbook, Set Theory and the Continuum Problem which is a rigorous and technical work, and does a great job introducing and developing some results on the idea of forcing [3].

[0] Introducción a la Filosofía, César Tejedor.

[1] https://static01.nyt.com/packages/pdf/crossword/Smullyan_Ali... the story is in pp. 1-6

[2] https://books.google.cl/books?id=fzuKc5dGN5gC&lpg=PT80&ots=Q... until the comment of Second Positivist

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing_(mathematics)

throw_away2• 4 years ago

Fave Raymond Smullyan essay:

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTa...

I once printed this out & gave it to a pair of repeat Jehovah's Witness door-knockers I had befriended. Don't know how they took it as the next time they came around my roommates, unaware of our friendship, told them I moved & they never returned.

draw_down• 4 years ago

Then you would love “The Tao Is Silent”! I believe this piece appears in the book, but either way it’s very reminiscent.

smulloni2• 4 years ago

It is indeed in The Tao Is Silent — Raymond's first popular book and one of his best. There's a recent reading of the dialogue on YouTube by Curt Jaimungal, on the "Theory of Everything" channel: https://youtu.be/P-jh6tRh3Jw

throw_away2• 4 years ago

Thanks! I had originally found it in Douglas Hofstadter's & Daniel Dennett's anthology, The Mind's I, which I also strongly recommend to those who haven't heard of it.

pasquinelli2• 4 years ago

my daughter and i have used "what is the name of this book?" and now "to mock a mockingbird" as the first slot in the day for her homeschooling. his books are really wonderful. public schools should be lousy with them.

lupire• 4 years ago

Schools certainly are lousy without them.

dalmo3• 4 years ago

Got into a little bit of his work early in uni, which inspired me into logic research and ultimately to me publishing/presenting my research at a conference he also attended. I met him on a boat trip and he was doing coin tricks, at the age of 88. What a character.

The Raymond Smullyan Society

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