Instituttseminar med Moshe Vardi

Tittel: And Logic Begat Computer Science: When Giants Roamed the Earth.

Abstract: During the past fifty years there has been extensive, continuous, and growing interaction between logic and computer science. In fact, logic has been called "the calculus of computer science". The argument is that logic plays a fundamental role in computer science, similar to that played by calculus in the physical sciences and traditional engineering disciplines.  Indeed, logic plays an important role in areas of computer science as disparate as architecture (logic gates), software engineering (specification and verification), programming languages (semantics, logic programming), databases (relational algebra and SQL), artificial intelligence (automated theorem proving), algorithms (complexity and expressiveness), and theory of computation (general notions of computability). This non-technical talk will provide an overview of the unusual effectiveness of logic in computerscience by surveying the history of logic in computer science, going back all the way to Aristotle and Euclid, and showing how logic actually gave rise to computer science.

About the speaker: Moshe Y. Vardi is Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science and on teaching logic across the curriculum. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of many prestigious international prizes such as the Gödel Prize in 2000, the Kannelakis Award in 2005, and the Blaise Pascal Medal 2008. Last but not least he is Editor-in-Chief of the Communications of the ACM.