A Concise Introduction to Mathematical Logic (Universitext)

by Lev Beklemishev, Moscow The ?eld of mathematical logic—evolving around the notions of logical validity, provability, and computation—was created in the ?rst half of the previous century by a cohort of brilliant mathematicians and philosophers such as Frege, Hilbert, Gödel, Turing, Tarski, Malcev, Gentzen, and some others. The development of this discipline is arguably among the highest achievements of science in the twentieth century: it expanded mat- matics into a novel area of applications, subjected logical reasoning and computability to rigorous analysis, and eventually led to the creation of computers. The textbook by Professor Wolfgang Rautenberg is a well-written - troduction to this beautiful and coherent subject. It contains classical material such as logical calculi, beginnings of model theory, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, as well as some topics motivated by appli- tions, such as a chapter on logic programming. The author has taken great care to make the exposition readable and concise; each section is accompanied by a good selection of exercises. A special word of praise is due for the author’s presentation of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, in which the author has succeeded in giving an accurate and simple proof of the derivability conditions and the provable ? -completeness, a technically di?cult point that is usually 1 omittedintextbooksofcomparablelevel. Thisworkcanberecommended to all students who want to learn the foundations of mathematical logic.

Traditional logic as a part of philosophy is one of the oldest scientific disciplines and can be traced back to the Stoics and to Aristotle. Mathematical logic, however, is a relatively young discipline and arose from the endeavors of Peano, Frege, and others to create a logistic foundation for mathematics. It steadily developed during the twentieth century into a broad discipline with several sub-areas and numerous applications in mathematics, informatics, linguistics and philosophy.

This book treats the most important material in a concise and streamlined fashion. The third edition is a thorough and expanded revision of the former. Although the book is intended for use as a graduate text, the first three chapters can easily be read by undergraduates interested in mathematical logic. These initial chapters cover the material for an introductory course on mathematical logic, combined with applications of formalization techniques to set theory. Chapter 3 is partly of descriptive nature, providing a view towards algorithmic decision problems, automated theorem proving, non-standard models including non-standard analysis, and related topics.

The remaining chapters contain basic material on logic programming for logicians and computer scientists, model theory, recursion theory, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, and applications of mathematical logic. Philosophical and foundational problems of mathematics are discussed throughout the text. Each section of the seven chapters ends with exercises some of which of importance for the text itself. There are hints to most of the exercises in a separate file Solution Hints to the Exercises which is not part of the book but is available from the author’s website.