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Mathematical logic and set theory

Set theory is the foundation of pure mathematics: all of mathematics can be represented in set theory.

Bristol is the pre-eminent UK establishment in which to research and study set theory and the department has a distinguished history in mathematical logic, starting with John Shepherdson who built up the logic group at Bristol in the 1960s & 1970s.

Detail from Real Numbers, by Tessa Coe. Image courtesy of the artist.

Some infinities are bigger than others

 

Today, research in our group includes: working out the relationships between different types of infinity; finding strategies for two-person perfect-information games; incompleteness of axiomatic systems; paradoxes; the philosophy of mathematics and logic applied to scientific deduction.

There are strong links between Bristol's mathematics and philosophy departments at the level of mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics and research attracts funding from the British Academy and EPSRC as well as Economic and Social Research Council, ESCR.


Recent publications
  • An analytic Zariski structure over a field (2006)
    Nicholas J Peatfield
    Archive for Mathematical Logic, vol: 45, Issue: 6, Pages: 739 - 768
    URL provided by the author
  • Non-deterministic halting times for Hamkins-Kidder Turing machines (2006)
    P.D. Welch
    Logical Approaches to Computational Barriers
    Editors: A. Beckmann, U. Berger, B. Lowe, J. Tucker
    Page numbers: 571 - 574
    Publisher: Springer
    Address: CiE 2007, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3988
    URL provided by the author