This should be fun!
Distress - it's like the kitchen sink of hard/near-future SF
Quarantine - very enjoyable, but a bit simple-minded
Incandescence - seems like a return to early Egan's minimalism
Permutation City - cool, but rather off for me
Schild's Ladder - doesn't feel innovative, the ending has the same vibe as that of Permutation
Zendegi - was expecting more LW mockery after the discussions, unfortunately it was very limited
Diaspora - although brilliant in some respects, very confusingly written
Teranesia - just boring, I understand why it's not so known
Haven't read yet An Unusual Angle; the Orthogonal trilogy I'll read when I get it whole.
A nearby store has this sign that kinda reminds me of What the Tortoise Said to Achilles:
Products marked with can be heated at your request!
Definitely not making this up. Showed this today to my girlfriend who was speechless upon exiting the store.
You should recurse one level deeper and put a sign outside the store saying "Products marked purchased in stores marked with can be heated at your request!"> can be heated at your request!"
This happened when I was 12 years old. I was trying to solve a problem at a mathematical contest which involved proving some identity with the nth powers of 5 and 7. I recall thinking vaguely "if you go to n+1 what is added in the left hand side is also in the right hand side" and so I discovered mathematical induction. In ten minutes I had a rigorous proof. Though, I didn't find it so convincing, so I ended with an unsure-of-myself comment "Hence, it is also valid for 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on..."
When I was in high school, creationism se
Marker is the closest to the state of the art. Hodges is a bit verbose and for beginners. Poizat is a little idiosyncratic (just look at the Introduction!).
I am also interested in the basis of MIRI's recommendation. Perhaps they are not too connected to actual mathematicians studying it, as model theory is pretty much a fringe topic.
What examples can you give of books that contain discussions of advanced (graduate or research-level) mathematics, similar to what Greg Egan does in his novels (I suppose the majority of such books are hard sci-fi, though I'm not betting on it)? I'm trying to find out what has already been done in the area.
You can see it now in action: the RSS feed is two articles behind the blog. (I waited for the problem to show up.)
EDIT (2013-12-28): The RSS feed has updated.
I did some Googling after reading the article and found this book by Dijkstra and Scholten actually showing how a first-order language could be adapted to yield easy and teachable corectness proofs. That is actually amazing! I have a degree in CS and unfortunately I've never seen a formal specification system that could actually be implemented and not be just some almost-tautological mathematical logic, like so many systems that exist in the academia. Thanks very much for the link.
There is also a TV adaptation from 1999), where the chronology is a bit mixed-up because it presents the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as some sort of "prelude" to the Flood, whereas in the Bible the Sodom story is several hundred years after Noah. The reason why I'm bringing this up is that in that film, the destruction of Sodom is presented with fireballs/meteorites, which also feature in this linked trailer, so I'm lead to think this film will also distill the two stories together in some way (there is no fire-related destruction in the Bi...
I tried to find a good book on the mathematics (not the philosophy!) of second-order logic on my usual sources (like mathoverflow.net discussions), but so far they have rendered nothing. Given that, as I understand it, there is some interest on these forums in SOL, can anyone help me with a recommendation? Thanks.
This thing can happen even in mathematics or theoretical CS, where there can be a gradual growth of a group of people researching something which gets ignored by and/or has no relevance to the mainstream community.
A good example is institutional model theory, whose practicioners think it is the ultimate theory of abstract logic, even though its accomplishments remain to be seen.
A year ago, I was going to the local Institute of Mathematics (I live in Bucharest) to attend a short talk on mathematical logic. The talk was scheduled at noon. Given that I had spent the night before at my girlfriend's and we were going somewhere together in the afternoon, I took her with me. While walking towards the Institute, I said to her that I don't remember the name of the speaker. She said that maybe it's a guy that we had met at a conference two months before (that conference was on a completely different area of math, namely algebraic combinato...
..."I spread the map out on the dining room table, and I held down the corners with cans of V8. The dots from where I'd found things looked like the stars in the universe. I connected them, like an astrologer, and if you squinted your eyes like a Chinese person, it kind of looked like the word 'fragile'. [...] I erased and connected the dots to make 'porte'. I had the revelation that I could connect the dots to make 'cyborg', and 'platypus', and 'boobs', and even 'Oskar', if you were extremely Chinese. I could connect them to make almost anything I want
Nassim Nicholas Taleb.