TITLE: Vicious Queues and Vicious Circles

PRESENTER: Raja Natarajan, http://www.tcs.tifr.res.in/~raja/, raja@tifr.res.in

AFFILIATION:TIFR, Mumbai, http://www.tcs.tifr.res.in

DATE: Thursday 8th October 2009

TIME: 12:00:00

PLACE: CSE Seminar Room, L1 K17_113

ABSTRACT:

We will describe some of the preliminary results from an ongoing research
program to reconstruct the proofs of fundamental theorems in logic using
a minimal repertoire of basic constructs and reasoning mechanisms.
In particular we shall examine an array of paradoxes for the kind of
constructs they employ, and use them as a guide to re-examine the proof
of Cantor's theorem in set theory.

We shall present two uncommon proofs of Cantor's theorem in set theory.
In addition to being novel, the proofs that we discuss will differ from
the most well known proofs of Cantor's theorem in an important way.
Notable features include the way in which in which one of them makes use
of the notion of negation, and also the dual relationship that the two
proofs share with each other.

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER:

Raja Natarajan is a faculty member in the School of Technology and
Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India.
He completed his Master's degree at the Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, India, and his Ph.D. at the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research. He has held visiting positions at the University of Nijmegen,
Netherlands; EPFL, Switzerland, and the University of Paris-7, France. He
is a member of the editorial board of the journal ``Logica Universalis'',
and a guest editor of ``Sadhana'' -- the Engineering Journal of the Indian
Academy of Sciences. His research interests include Type theory and
Interactive Theorem Proving, Formal Methods, and Models of Interacting
Processes. More details of his research activities may be found on his
homepage: http://www.tcs.tifr.res.in/~raja

Host:

Arcot Sowmya

Seminar Convenor:

Van Hai Ho