Dr T.E. Forster:
Office: Room 3, Ground floor, Pavilion C;
`phone in department (01223)-337981;
mobile in UK +44-7887-701-562;
mobile in NZ +64-210580093.
Email: tf@dpmms.cam.ac.uk
Here is my electronic diary.
(You will need to contact me for the password)
For Google's benefit I record here that my name is often misspelled `Thomas Foster' and `Thomas Forester'
Click here for Poem of the Week.
Click here for Bon Mot of the Week.
Affiliations:
I am a Life Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge, (where I
am also Director of Studies in Computer Science) and an affiliated
lecturer in the department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
here in Cambridge. Outside Cambridge my affiliations are:
Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia ; (I have a
home page there, tho' i have no write access to it!); Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Philosophy department at
the University of Canterbury at Christchurch;
Visiting Lecturer at Queen Mary
Westfield ; External Researcher of the Auckland Centre for Discrete
Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science in New Zealand, and a Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at
the University of Pittsburgh. When I was in residence there I
stayed - as many fellows do - in Carl
Hempel's flat. The Pittsburgh Center [sic] also has conferences. (Pittsburgh has many attractions beyond its six (!) universities:
serious weather, a wonderful orchestra, opera houses, rivers, cable
cars, the best chips in America (at the
Original Hot Dog. Be sure to ask for a small portion), steel
mills, lots of history (much of it
sad), and, last but not least, an
airport called - wait for it - ``Tom Foerster International Airport''!
(The correct explanation for this spelling mistake is surely the one found by Sten Vikner who pointed out that they must have misplaced my middle initial.)
Chores:
I organised the 70th anniversary NF meeting (``NFUK'') in Cambridge at the end of May 2007.
I am on the Comité de Redaction of the Belgian Centre National de
Recherches de Logique;
I am a ``correspondent étranger" of
Logique et Analyse and an associate editor of The Human Nature review.
I am the Cambridge horn (in fact the Principal Researcher(!)) of
the three-horned beast that is Cameleon.
I was Conference
Director for the (now dormant) St Luke's Institute, in which
capacity I organised BILAP (Buddhism in
Logic and Analytic Philosophy) which held its inaugural meeting in
Cambridge in November 2005, and the Logic and
Rhetoric conference held in Cambridge on the last weekend of
October 2006.
I am on the
DPMMS Quiz team
which mercilessly crushed all opposition to be the winners in the
800th anniversary Quiz context. At the 800th anniversary garden
party we went on to
murder a team of alumni. (That link is not for the squeamish).
Movements:
He is now back in Cambridge, lecturing
the logic module(!) in the Computer Science M.Phil, and the
logic course for linguistics students. In the lent (second) term
(2010) he will be lecturing Part III Set theory and Logic ,
and Reasoning and Logic to
first-years at UEA.
Research:
I work on Set Theory, Type Theory, BQO theory, Philosophy of Mathematics and Philosophy of Mind. I developed
this last interest when I was a music+philosophy student and it led me
into Neurophysiology: until relatively recently I was a paid-up member of the Electro-Physiological
Technologists Association. (Have a look at an EEG ). I had to give up
my part-time post at Addenbrooke's doing EEGs to take up my Pittsburgh
Fellowship
, but I am always interested in EEG locum work. The
combination of an interest in Philosophy of Mind and a training in
logic has given me an abiding interest in the logic of virtual
(theoretical) entities. (Having the part of the Cheshire Cat in the
school production of Alice about the time the above photograph was
taken probably played a part too). Indeed when the Logic and
Philosophy of Science department at the University of California at
Irvine were so kind as to invite me to spend three months with
them I took the opportunity to write a book about it, called Reasoning about Theoretical Entities. Not
surprisingly, given my exposure to the Life Sciences and my interest
in reasoning about theoretical entities, I have an interest in
Philosophy of Biology. Perhaps I'll get round to giving a course on
it one day. Most of my publications concern Quine's set theory NF,
for which an introduction for a general audience can be found here (it was a 60th anniversary retrospective article
for the American Mathematical Monthly).
Visitors
In 2003-4 I had
Olivier Esser
here in Cambridge as my post-doc, working on NF.
Thierry Libert was
here last year, and again briefly this year, continuing his
project to teach me some positive set theory (GPC etc: this isn't
Set-Theory-by-Compte, despite the adjective and the French Connection).
Teaching
Cambridge teaching materials (for my Cambridge students and readable only from .cam.ac.uk addresses);
If you want to book a supervision with me you will want to consult
my
electronic diary
.(You will need to contact me for the password)
If you are a Cambridge physiology student thinking of doing my Part II project have a look at the proposal. I don't think I can support it now (I am no longer at Addenbrooke's) but I think the department there would still be interested.
Would you like to study Set Theory in Cambridge? At
present I am trying to interest people in the constructions discussed
in my AMS Baltimore meeting article, but
there are plenty of morsels left. I would be interested in taking on
some more Ph.D. students to work on NF and to this end I provide a
list of suitable thesis topics.
At present I have only two Ph.D. students:
Dang Vu
and Zachiri McKenzie
but we are a very active group - not least because of the energy and help of
Nathan Bowler -
and recruits will be made welcome.
Seminars
I organise those Cameleon meetings that take place in Cambridge.
I organise the Set Theory seminar in DPMMS. In 2008/9 it will meet in MR 12 in the CMS on wednesdays at 14:00-16:00 in term.
I belong to the theory group at the
Computer Laboratory.
Ancestry
My mother came from Basel, the city that produced
Leonhard Euler and Holbein and has been home to the Bernoulli family
since they were expelled by the Reyes Catolicos (isn't that enough for
a small town???). We know about the mathematicians of course, (and
even the tennis players: Roger Federer is a Basler) but it has also
produced some wonderful painters - and not just Holbein. Sadly the
creator of this little gem in the
Eulerstrasse (yes, it's the same Euler) did not sign his work and his
(her?) identity was not recorded for posterity. I tell everyone I am
a fourth-generation academic, and this is because of her (my mother's)
grandfather who was a fairly well-known chemist (he discovered the
rearrangement of allyl thiocyanate to allyl isothiocyanate)
from whom i inherited through her not only some genes for doing
chemistry but also a dressing-gown
.
But it's intellectual ancestry one worries about.
I had two DoktorVater: Adrian Mathias in Cambridge, and
Maurice Boffa
in Brussels. Sadly, Boffa died in 2001: it is a terrible loss.
Here are two group pictures, with three of his
Ph.D. students.
My
other DoktorVater,
Adrian Mathias, is still very much alive - for the moment at
least: he does live uncomfortably near an active volcano!) Like
Everyone Who Is Anyone in Silicon Fen I worked (briefly) for Clive Sinclair, in my case in
the
Sinclair Radionics days. (He was a neighbour of my parents). My
Erdös
number is 3: Forster-Truss-Shelah-Erdös ; (and Erdös many years
ago described me as ``a very strange young man''!). But there are
other metrics. My Trotsky number is 3 (I shared an office with a colleague
(Giovanna Corsi) who shared an office with a colleague
(Jean van Heijenoort) who was Trotsky's bodyguard); my Beethoven
number is 4, since I have shaken hands with a man who shook hands with
a man who shook hands with Grillparzer, who shook hands with
Beethoven, Liszt...well - everyone! I once played Garcia Lorca's
piano. I used to play chess with a woman who had been Tolstoy's
next-door neighbour, and had been taught by Alekhine
. When an infant
she had been dandled on Tchaikovsky's knee. If you are a Canadian you
may be impressed by the fact that I once had my portrait painted by Barker Fairley (he's the one with the pipe in
this group picture of the group of seven); apparently I am the only
person other than Wittgenstein to have given a course of lectures in
Cambridge gazetted under the title `Philosophy'; my Ph.D. thesis title
("N.F.") is the shortest on record; as far as I know I am the only
person to have a Cambridge Ph.D. in mathematics without having done
any undergraduate mathematics; finally I must surely be the only Logic
Ph.D. anywhere in the world who is also licenced to drive an EEG
machine. My remaining distinguishing features are of less
interest. Born in the oldest house in Cambridge? And a haunted one at
that? (It's the Abbey House. It
had been a gift from Lord Fairhaven to the Cambridge City Council who then
divided it into flats and let them out - so should I ever want to go
into politics I can always say I was born in council house! and I was
delivered by Alice
Roughton). The only person to have been at school with both the
erstwhile Home Secretary (Charles Clarke) and the Queen's (erstwhile)
private secretary (Robin Janvrin)? (Not to mention the - sadly -
thoroughly unmemorable
Nick Drake who was in my Russian class at Marlborough). The
tabloids are not beating a path to my door. I do not - yet - have a
theorem named after me, (nor even an
airport, see above) tho' there is a lifeform bearing my name: not a
child - sadly- but a midge
called Telnatogeton Forsteri. This
lives only in New Zealand - there is a type specimen in my desk drawer in
Cambridge but it's definitely dead. This lifeform was discovered by my
friend John Leader. If you wish to name an invertebrate or a theorem - or even an airport -
after me, feel free.
Publications:
A fairly complete bibliography of my published writings can be found
here.
My lectures for the Part II logic course have now come out as Logic, Induction and Sets. A list of errata for this
book is to be found here.
Those works which the publishers
have allowed me to make available have links on this page.
Additionally there are links to three unpublished papers:
Falsifiability: what Popper got right ;
My annotated translation of Coret's
Les cas stratifiées du schema de remplacement
is probably not publishable,
but I like to think it is a useful resource to NF scholars.
Similarly
Cartesian-closedness fails in NF
is
too short to be publishable but may be a useful resource for NF scholars.
The remaining papers have all appeared or have been accepted.
A semantic characterisation of the
well-typed formulae of lambda calculus is from Theoretical
Computer Science.
The paper
Asynchronous games explores a way of representing asynchonous
games (Homicidal Chauffeur etc.) as alternating discrete (``clocked'')
games. I would be interested in feedback. It
has now appeared in the procedings of the Liverpool july 2004 meeting
on knowledge and games, but the version here will always be the more
up-to-date one.
The editors are allowing me to post here my introduction
to the Buddhism in Logic and Analytical
Philosophy volume soon to be brought out by OUP.
Paris-Harrington in an NF
context discusses the implications of the fact that - apparently -
the statement of the theorem is not stratified/welltyped in the
Russell-Quine sense. It has appeared in volume 17 of the Cahiers
du Centre de Logique
My talk at the LMS
Sets-and-games meeting:
Games played on an
illfounded membership relation has now appeared in the Boffa 60th
birthday festschrift.
Finite-to-one maps has now appeared in the JSL. It shows, without any use of AC, that if there is a
finite-to-one surjection from the power set of X to X then X is
genuinely finite (its cardinal is a natural number). I proved it years
ago and tho'rt nothing of it but Adrian Mathias and James Cummings
couldn't prove it when I challenged them so I tho'rt it might be worth
publishing and the JSL agreed, bless `em. Greg Kirmayer claims that
he can improve this result, and i'm inclined to believe him.
Yablo's paradox without self-reference is in Logique et Analyse vol 185-8 (2004) pp 461-2.
Deterministic and Nondeterministic Strategies
for Hintikka games in First-order and Branching-quantifier logic
is in Logique et Analyse vol 195 pp 265-69.
Implementing Mathematical objects in Set Theory
will appear in the special number of Logique et Analyse devoted to Foundations of Set Theory.
AC fails in the natural analogues of V and L
that model the stratified fragment of ZF is a version (cleaned of
typos and minor infelicities) of the paper I gave at the Baltimore
joint meeting AMS/MAA in 2003. It is a work of breathtaking fertility:
read it and weep. Better still, read it and use the techniques in it to
prove Con(NF) before one of Dang Vu and Zachiri McKenzie does. (It's
their thesis topic and they're very sharp).
ZF +
Every set is the same size as a wellfounded set is in the March 2003 fascicule of the JSL;
BQOs and coinduction is in the dec. 2003 fascicule of Theoretical Computer Science;
The Modal Aether (wherein the egregious and vexatious errors of the possible world semanticists are expos'd, ridicul'd and confuted) is
in a collection called `Intentionality' edited by Reinhardt Kahle and
published by Springer. That was in .ps format; Here it is in pdf format but without the drawings.
Weak Set Theories related to HOL is an
improved version of my HUG 1994 paper from LNCS 859;
Why Set theory without the axiom of foundation? appeared in the Journal of Logic and Computation in 1994;
Sethood and Situations
(jointly written with Cathy Rood Wyss) has appeared in Computational Linguistics;
Permutations and Wellfoundedness: the true meaning of the Bizarre Arithmetic of Quine's NF is in the JSL vol 71 march 2006 pp 227-240.
Church's Set Theory with a Universal Set is a revision and expansion of the last chapter of my book on set theory with a universal set, and supercedes it. It was written for the Alonzo Church festschrift. The version here is to be
preferred to the version in print, as I remove typos and mathematical
errors from it as they come to my notice.
Dualitaet is my annotated and illustrated translation of Specker's seminal
paper on duality in projective geometry. I prepared it for the
Garland Quinefest volumes, where it finds a natural place because of
the development of those ideas of duality into ideas of typical
ambiguity in Type theory and NF. I have removed from this copy a typo that mars the Garland version. Chad Brown reckons there is a mistake in the original. Click here for his analysis.
Sharvy's Lucy and Benjamin Puzzle is included here with the permission of Springer, since I have given them the copyright so it can appear in Studia Logica.
The organisers of the Riga conference on paradoxes have allowed me to
post here this brief Note on
Paradoxes in Ethics which will appear in their proceedings.
Erdos-Rado without Choice has been
accepted by the Journal of Symbolic Logic. The version linked here
contains some informative comments by a referee which readers will
find very helpful; I am grateful to him/her for permission to include
them here.
Everyone who is anyone has written an article under the title
The iterative conception of set.
My contribution under this title
was voted one of the ten best philosophy articles of 2008 by the Philosophers' Annual.
Three extended reviews are here:
(i) My Computer
Journal review of Barwise and Moss's Vicious
Circles. Readers of that review - and others with an antiquarian
interest in the early literature on funny set theories - may want to
see my 1982 paper on
Strong
Extensionality;
(ii) my Studia Logica review of
Ziegler-Booth's edition of the collected set-theoretic writings of Paul Finsler, and
(iii) my Physis
review of From Dedekind to
Goedel.
Jamie Gabbay
recorded this talk
i gave at Heriot-Watt.
Leisure:
In my pathetically few hours of leisure I strive to keep up my interest in
Astronomy and Politics
....and, of course, neurology (this file is called Louise's Brain):
DPMMS front page.
