Institute of Computer Science

By the author of The Cambridge Quintet, John L. Casti's new book continues the tradition of combining fact with just the right dose of fiction--bringing the science to us in a wholly informative and entertaining way. In the fall of 1933 the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, welcomed its first faculty member, Albert Einstein. With this superstar on the roster, the Institute was able to attract the greatest scholars, scientists, and poets from around the world. It was an intellectual haven, a place where the most brilliant minds on the planet, sheltered from the outside world's cares and calamities, could collaborate and devote their time to the pure and exclusive pursuit of knowledge. For many of them, it was the "one, true, platonic heaven." Over the years, key figures at the Institute began to question the limits to what science could tell us about the world, pondering the universal secrets it might unlock. Could science be the ultimate source of truth or are there intrinsic limits, built into the very fabric of the universe, to what we can learn? In the late 1940s and early 1950s, this important question was being asked by some of the Institute's deepest thinkers. Enter the dramatis personae to illuminate the science and the philosophy of the time. Mathematical logician Kurt Godel was the unacknowledged Grant Exalted Ruler of this platonic estate. Also in residence was his colleague, the Hungarian-American polymath John van Neumann, developer of game theory, the axiomatic foundations of quantum mechanics, and the digital computer. Einstein, by common consensus the greatest physicist the 20th century had ever known, also figures large in this story.And, of course, the director of the Institute, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, must by necessity be key to any story that focuses in on this time and place.

Mathematical Logic for Computer Science is a mathematics textbook with theorems and proofs, but the choice of topics has been guided by the needs of computer science students. The method of semantic tableaux provides an elegant way to teach logic that is both theoretically sound and yet sufficiently elementary for undergraduates. To provide a balanced treatment of logic, tableaux are related to deductive proof systems.The logical systems presented are: - Propositional calculus (including binary decision diagrams); - Predicate calculus; - Resolution; - Hoare logic; - Z; - Temporal logic.Answers to exercises as well as Prolog source code for algorithms may be found via the Springer London web site: http: //www.springer.co.uk/com pubs/ct mlcs.htmMordechai Ben-Ari is Associate Professor at the Department of Science Teaching of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He has published textbooks on concurrent programming and programming languages.