APPLICATIONS

As the ancient Greeks developed the concept of formal logic and the paradox, they created a form of science that gave rise to the computational power seen today. These interrelated developments were the subject of an IT Eminent Lecture Series for the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, along with the LSU Department of Computer Science, featuring Moshe Y. Vardi, the George Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Computer and Information Technology Institute at Rice University. Vardi’s lecture took place Monday, June 11, at LSU’s Howe Russell Goescience Complex. In his lecture, Vardi provided an overview of the unusual effectiveness of logic in computer science 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. Vardi described how various logicians derived their theories and explanations, which in turn led to the rise of complex mathematical equations. These same formulas and algorithms, developed hundreds of years ago, provide the basis for modern computation. Vardi described programming as “logic in action,” saying computation lies at the heart of mathematics. The Pentium processors built today are modeled on early theories of logic designed to show how different elements relate.