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[pozorvlak]

I was pleasantly astonished to see Peter Norvig comment on my recent post about the Stanford online courses - with 160,000 students competing for his attention, that's dedication! I completely take his point that I'm only a small part of the intended audience, and what works best for me is probably not what works best for the students they really

Comments

[htfb]

For the complete picture you need also to mention the philosophers' paper 119, Formal Logic, which is (or used to be - I'm out of touch) in three parts covering, more or less, the logic and set theory sides of b1 and also enough computability and proof theory to reach (the statement of) Goedel's incompleteness theorems. All for people without any mathematics or symbolic reasoning in the rest of their course. The paper had a habit of attracting very bright philosophers who could probably have read maths if they'd wanted, and who'd enjoyed the ItSL, and then tripping them up badly---tutorials were full of tears

[pozorvlak]

*Ouch*. That sounds awful.

There were also, IIRC, fourth-year maths papers on Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems and Model Theory, neither of which I did. I did, on the other hand, do Abramsky's course on Game Semantics, which had some logical content.

[half_of_monty]

The European Logic Colloquia were full of people who couldn't talk to one another at all.

I hardly think logic is unique within pure maths for having this property.

[pozorvlak]

I think htfb's point was that the problem's particularly acute in logic, as only half of those present are mathematicians...

Pity you missed b1

[half_of_monty]

It was awesome! Not only did one get ones marked in haiku by hjfb, but also, one could spend the majority of the lectures sitting in the back row nattering to the Platonic Idealised Haskell Coder. Happy days.

Re: Pity you missed b1

[pozorvlak]

You're probably right. I think I replaced it with the b3 mechanics course, which was 50% stunningly beautiful (Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics) and 50% World O' Pain (fluid dynamics). In the end my b3 Finals score was so low I'd have done more for my overall grade if I'd skipped the exam and spent three hours revising something else. Or, better, sleeping.

Re: Pity you missed b1

[half_of_monty]

[utter pedantry] The Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics / fluid dynamics course was a 2nd year course. b3 was geometry: differentiable manifolds and projective geometry. We did it together. Along with b2 (algebra). Then I think you did some mathematical physics instead of the lovely b1 I was doing. [/utter pedantry]

b3: now there's a course I really should not have done. I never would have been tempted to do a phd in the subject if I hadn't. Ah well.

Re: Pity you missed b1

[pozorvlak]

Oh yes. That was a fun course - the classification theorem for surfaces is lovely, and I for one am glad I've seen a proof of it. Of course, I had the sense not to continue in the field :-)