![]() Today, it announced a new Cloud Reliability Platform (CRP) designed to help companies migrate to AWS or Azure safely in a compliant way - and to keep that revenue engine cranking.ĬEO Ken Ziegler says that Logicworks has taken a long view to building the business, and today’s announcement is the culmination of a lot of work over the years of staying tightly connected to the major cloud platforms. By following that approach, the late-stage startup is closing in on $100 million in revenue. But, please, while pitying those students, spare a thought also for the poor graduate students who are the Teaching Assistants of these classes.Logicworks might not be a household name, but since 2012 it has been working with customers to help them move to the cloud and manage their workloads once they get there. ![]() So regarding what you wrote: “I pity the poor students who have this inflicted on them!” Oh yes apart from the very few ones who excelled in the class (and would excel anyway and probably with any kind of textbook), I still remember the struggles written in the faces of most of the others. And then, a fate worse than death turned all the fun of doing logic to an endless boredom (fortunately for only one year), by being forced to read the drafts of this book and help students cope with their weekly assignments. ![]() It was actually a valuable lesson for me (as the only tutor of the class) but from the reverse: how *not* to (never!) teach introductory logic.Īs a math- and logic-phobic during my early master’s years, I had finally come to appreciate and admire (and actually love!) logic through your two gems (IFL and IGT, each one read twice, cover to cover). The class was based on what were at the time the early drafts of this book. Post navigationįate had it for me that, during my PhD, I would be a TA in the first author’s introductory course to logic. If you want a good introduction to formal logic which also ranges quite widely, I’d stick to Nick Smith’s! A rather depressing read, then, which I can’t recommend at all. I could go into more detail, but I won’t. Who would ever guess from these longueurs that the beautiful and compelling basic idea of a quantifier/variable notation for expressions of generality is so very neat and attractive once explained that it can be introduced well enough to convey a reading knowledge to any beginning mathematics student in half a lecture? (I was surprised to see that one of the authors does have some mathematical background - yet the writing throughout gives no sense of the aesthetic attractions of rigorous mathematical ideas.) The same applies in spades to the grimly laborious chapters introducing the language of predicate logic. Things aren’t helped by the printed pages being a typographical mess. It is really pretty difficult to imagine a reader coming to appreciate that by doing things Fitch-style we can arrive at a really rather elegant, natural, and highly user-friendly system. But the authors plod through a turgid presentation, without zip and zest, making very heavy going of things. Good choice (though the system isn’t as streamlined as it could be). ![]() Chapter 6 presents a Fitch-style deduction system for propositional logic. I pity the poor students who have this inflicted on them! It’s not just heavy-handed in explaining the technicalities, but quite generally the long-winded prose is depressingly clotted and terminally uninviting. You might be tempted to worry, then, that a book that especially advertises itself as “rigorous” is likely to be unnecessarily laboured. Or at least, as rigorous as they need to be - and as they say, “sufficient unto the day is the rigour thereof”. That’s a strange subtitle, no? As if introductions to formal logic aren’t usually rigorous. But you’ll forgive me that: life is short and patience limited. Not that I’ve struggled through all 645 pages. Having now taken a look at the book, I’ll save you the trouble of doing the same. But here’s yet another one, Logic Works: A Rigorous Introduction to Formal Logic by Lorne Falkenstein, Scott Stapleford and Molly Kao (published just six months ago by Routledge). I can hardly complain about people adding unnecessarily to the over-supply of introductory logic books, having done it myself.
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