Remembering the Future

The title is derived from Wigner's famous article on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, which was devoted to raising and attempting to answer the important question: why should mathematics have been so useful to natural scientists? With respect to logic, my answer for the effectiveness of LICS is that, while computation is a physical phenomenon, it is a phenomenon that is best understood via powerful abstractions, and the most powerful abstractions we have at the moment are abstractions in mathematical logic, because of the fundamental relationship of Turing completeness to Goedelian incompleteness.

Topics: Logic | Mathematics