logic
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will get you everywhere.

Einstein
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Logic is an old interest of mine. My first introduction was Lemmon's Beginning Logic which gave a natural deduction presentation. Subsequently I redisovered logic, in the shape of Prolog, when I moved to computer science. Prolog influenced my work in high-performance automated reasoning which in turn led to the grandfather of Shen, SEQUEL (SEQUEnt processing Language), in 1993.

SEQUEL united two themes; my interest in the high-level specification of inference rules in sequent calculus and the compilation of those rules into efficient code. SEQUEL was followed by Qi (2005) and Shen (2011). You can find an exposition of sequent calculus in
chapter 18 of The Book of Shen.

In 2003 I taught discrete maths at Stony Brook and in 2004, wrote up my class notes into a text Logic, Proof and Computation. This went through a number of revisions and the third edition was issued in May of 2023. LPC is designed as a multidisciplinary reader for students in philosophy and computing who are approaching logic for the first time. LPC uses computer-assisted proof in first-order logic and the code for this was specified using the Logic Lab; a program that allows the user to enter deduction rules direct to the machine, which are then compiled into efficient code.

I'm also working, on and off, on a hobby project, THORN (Theorem prover based on HORN clause logic) which uses Prolog technology, specifically Shen Prolog, to compile first-order axioms into efficient code.

Logic, Proof and Computation (3rd edition)

copyright (c) Mark Tarver 2025