Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August, 2010

My top ten pieces of software

And now for something completely different. A brief list of neat pieces of software I've been using (widely understood to include online services). WinEdt (6.0) - my favorite LaTeX editor. I've been trying to use quite a few different editors, but this one really works for me. It's not freeware, it's not Linux-compatible (as you could figure out from its name). But I like how you can set up your own macros, how it uses bookmarks, and how it handles large multi-file projects. Allway Sync - a neat program (freeware in its moderate version) that helps you to synchronize your files across different units. If you switch between computers more than a few times a week, this one's really cool. What I've done is I configured it to check my flash disk automatically once I plug it in on any computer I'm using and to automatically update the files. Saves lots of time and helps to avoid file version mix-ups. PDFX-Change - a nice PDF viewer with convenient commenti

How not to use the Church-Turing thesis against platonism

Recently, I've written up a quick note explaining why an argument against platonism, based on the Church-Turing thesis and deployed by Olszewski (1999) doesn't work. It's here . Abstract below. Olszewski [1999] claims that the Church-Turing thesis can be used in an argument against platonism in philosophy of mathematics. I argue that the argument relies on the illegitimate conflation of effective computability with computability by any means, and that even if it worked, it would not be an argument against platonism, but rather against any realism about truth-value of mathematical sentences.

Some Polish classics online

The Polish Virtual Library of Science made quite a few classical volumes available. Among them, some historical volumes of Acta Arithmetica, Annales Polonici Mathematici, Fundamenta Mathematicae, Mathematical Monographs series, Mathematical Dissertations and Studia Mathematica. Here . Of special interest, Kuratowski's and Sierpinski's works in the Mathematical Monographs series . Here . Alas, some of the stuff is in French and some is in Polish.