Rice University, USA
A Logical Revolution
Mathematical logic was developed in an effort to provide formal foundations for mathematics. In this quest, which ultimately failed, logic begat computer science, yielding both computers and theoretical computer science.
But then logic turned out to be a disappointment as foundations for computer science, as almost all decision problems in logic are either unsolvable or intractable. Starting from the mid 1970s, however, there has been a quiet revolution in logic in computer science, and problems that are theoretically undecidable or intractable were shown to be quite feasible in practice. This talk describes the rise, fall, and rise of logic in computer science, describing several modern applications of logic to computing, include databases, hardware design, and software engineering.
Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. He is the recipient of several awards, including the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Blaise Pascal Medal, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, and the EATCS Distinguished
Achievements Award. He is the author and co-author of over 650 papers, as well as two books. He is a fellow of several societies, and a member of several academies, including the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science. He holds seven honorary doctorates. He is a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing.