Mathematical Reasoning The History And Impact Of The Dream Group

This collection of essays examines the key achievements and likely developments in the area of automated reasoning. In keeping with the group ethos, Automated Reasoning is interpreted liberally, spanning underpinning theory, tools for reasoning, argumentation, explanation, computational creativity, and pedagogy. Wider applications including secure and trustworthy software, and health care and emergency management. The book starts with a technically oriented history of the Edinburgh Automated Reasoning Group, written by Alan Bundy, which is followed by chapters from leading researchers associated with the group. Mathematical Reasoning: The History and Impact of the DReaM Group will attract considerable interest from researchers and practitioners of Automated Reasoning, including postgraduates. It should also be of interest to those researching the history of AI.

By presenting state-of-the-art results in logical reasoning and formal methods in the context of artificial intelligence and AI applications, this book commemorates the 60th birthday of Jörg H. Siekmann. The 30 revised reviewed papers are written by former and current students and colleagues of Jörg Siekmann; also included is an appraisal of the scientific career of Jörg Siekmann entitled "A Portrait of a Scientist: Logics, AI, and Politics." The papers are organized in four parts on logic and deduction, applications of logic, formal methods and security, and agents and planning.

'Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.' Douglas Adams, Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy We human beings have trouble with infinity - yet infinity is a surprisingly human subject. Philosophers and mathematicians have gone mad contemplating its nature and complexity - yet it is a concept routinely used by schoolchildren. Exploring the infinite is a journey into paradox. Here is a quantity that turns arithmetic on its head, making it feasible that 1 = 0. Here is a concept that enables us to cram as many extra guests as we like into an already full hotel. Most bizarrely of all, it is quite easy to show that there must be something bigger than infinity - when it surely should be the biggest thing that could possibly be. Brian Clegg takes us on a fascinating tour of that borderland between the extremely large and the ultimate that takes us from Archimedes, counting the grains of sand that would fill the universe, to the latest theories on the physical reality of the infinite. Full of unexpected delights, whether St Augustine contemplating the nature of creation, Newton and Leibniz battling over ownership of calculus, or Cantor struggling to publicise his vision of the transfinite, infinity's fascination is in the way it brings together the everyday and the extraordinary, prosaic daily life and the esoteric. Whether your interest in infinity is mathematical, philosophical, spiritual or just plain curious, this accessible book offers a stimulating and entertaining read.

This user-friendly book on group theory introduces topics in as simple a manner as possible and then gradually develops those topics into more advanced ones, eventually building up to the current state-of-the-art. By using simple examples from physics and mathematics, the advanced topics become logical extensions of ideas already introduced. In addition to being used as a textbook, this book would also be useful as a reference guide for graduates and researchers in particle, nuclear and hadron physics.

These provocative essays take a modern look at the 17th-century thinker's dream, examining the influences of mathematics on society, particularly in light of technological advances. They survey the conditions that elicit the application of mathematic principles; the applications' effectiveness; and how applied mathematics transform perceptions of reality. 1987 edition.

This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present.