Logical foundations: Personal perspective

Abstract

I dread this scenario. The deadline is close. A reminder from the Chief Editor arrives. I forward it to the guest author and find out that they had a difficult real- world problem, and the scheduled article is not ready. I am full of sympathy. But the result is all the same: the article is not there.

That happened once before in the long history of this column, in 2016. Then the jubilee of the 1966 Congress of Mathematicians gave me an excuse for a micro-memoir on the subject.

This time around I decided to repurpose a recent talk of mine [2]. But a talk, especially one with ample time for a subsequent discussion, is much different from a paper. It would normally take me months to turn the talk into a paper. Quick repurposing is necessarily imperfect, to say the least. Hence this apologia.