Can computer science solve our social problems? With Discourses on Social Software Jan Van Eijck and Rineke Verbrugge suggest it can, offering the reader a fascinating introduction to the innovative field of social software. Compiling a series of discussions involving a logician, a computer scientist, a philosopher, and a number of researchers from various other academic fields, this collection details the many ways in which the seemingly abstract disciplines of logic and computer science can be used to analyze and solve contemporary social problems.
Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of the first established historians of science to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by information technology to our understanding of the twentieth century.
Mahoney’s work ranged widely, from logic and the theory of computation to the development of software and applications as craft-work. But it was always informed by a unique perspective derived from his distinguished work on the history of medieval mathematics and experimental practice during the Scientific Revolution. His writings offered a new angle on very recent events and ideas and bridged the gaps between academic historians and computer scientists. Indeed, he came to believe that the field was irreducibly pluralistic and that there could be only histories of computing.
In this collection, Thomas Haigh presents thirteen of Mahoney’s essays and papers organized across three categories: historiography, software engineering, and theoretical computer science. His introduction surveys Mahoney’s work to trace the development of key themes, illuminate connections among different areas of his research, and put his contributions into context. The volume also includes an essay on Mahoney by his former students Jed Z. Buchwald and D. Graham Burnett. The result is a landmark work, of interest to computer professionals as well as historians of technology and science.
The field of weak arithmetics is an application of logical methods to number theory that was developed by mathematicians, philosophers, and theoretical computer scientists. In this volume, after a general presentation of weak arithmetics, the following topics are studied: the properties of integers of a real closed field equipped with exponentiation; conservation results for the induction schema restricted to first-order formulas with a finite number of alternations of quantifiers; a survey on a class of tools called pebble games; the fact that the reals e and pi have approximations expressed by first-order formulas using bounded quantifiers; properties of infinite pictures depending on the universe of sets used; a language that simulates in a sufficiently nice manner all algorithms of a certain restricted class; the logical complexity of the axiom of infinity in some variants of set theory without the axiom of foundation; and the complexity to determine whether a trace is included in another one.
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