E W Beth Centenary
Minisymposium on Mathematical Logic

Mathematical logic has developed from the foundational debates of the early 20th century into a deep and respected subfield of mathematics. The solution (or rather proof of unsolvability) of many mathematical problems by the technique of forcing, the connections between modern algebra and model theory, and other achievements of mathematical logic have established a mathematically active field of research with a strong feeling of coherence, often coordinated on the national level by learnèd societies as the AILA (Italy), the BLC (Great Britain), the DVMLG (Germany), and the VvL (The Netherlands).

Some parts of mathematical logic are intricately connected to mainstream mathematics (algebra, geometry, number theory, ergodic theory, etc.), other parts are more foundational. We stress that both parts of mathematical logic are important for the coherence of mathematical logic as a field. At the minisymposium at the 5ECM, we intend to represent both foundational work in mathematical logic and the connections to mainstream mathematics, organized in the framework of the traditional areas of mathematical logic.

The year 2008 marks the 100th anniversary of Evert Beth's birthday. The important Dutch logician Beth worked in the field of logic in the broad sense, philosophy of exact sciences, and the history of logic and philosophy of science, and founded the Instituut voor Grondslagenonderzoek en Filosofie der Exacte Wetenschappen in Amsterdam in 1952. As member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen and as one of the editors of the important book series Studies in logic and the foundations of mathematics, he played an crucial role in building the strong reputation that logic has in the Netherlands. The Evert Willem Beth Stichting is working towards the goal of continuing the work of Beth and is funding this minisymposium in order to commemorate Evert Beth.

Organizers.
Peter Koepke (Bonn, Germany), Benedikt Löwe (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Jaap van Oosten (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

Invited Speakers.
(Click on the titles of the talks to see the abstracts.)

• Mirna Dzamonja, University of East Anglia, England: Combinatorics of trees.
• Sy Friedman, Universität Wien, Austria: Consistency completeness.
• Mai Gehrke, Radboud Universiteit, The Netherlands: Duality theory as a Rosetta Stone for relational semantics.
• Erik Palmgren, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden: Point-free topology versus topology according to Brouwer and Bishop.
• Giovanni Sambin, Università di Padova, Italy: Minimalist foundation and pluralism in mathematics: computation and structure in topology.
• Katrin Tent, Universität Münster, Germany: Simplicity of certain automorphism groups.
• Boban Velickovic, Université Paris 7, France: PCF structures of height less than ω₃

Sponsors.
Associazione Italiana di Logica e sue Applicazioni, British Logic Colloquium, Deutsche Vereinigung für Mathematische Logik und für Grundlagen der Exakten Wissenschaften, Evert Willem Beth Stichting, Vereniging voor Logica en Wijsbegeerte der Exacte Wetenschappen.