The Raymond Smullyan Society

Fave Raymond Smullyan essay:

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTa...

I once printed this out & gave it to a pair of repeat Jehovah's Witness door-knockers I had befriended. Don't know how they took it as the next time they came around my roommates, unaware of our friendship, told them I moved & they never returned.

The logician, concert pianist, Taoist, and magician Raymond Smullyan has always been of interest to computer scientists. Besides being a polymath, he had Feynman's knack for being able to explain complex subjects in an accessible way.

In Raymond's case, via puzzles that unfolded ideas in recursion, infinity, Gödel's theories, logic, and more.

The Raymond Smullyan Society was formed to preserve his work, and it has just launched this web site.

In high school I had a Philosophy class, and its book [0] had chapters in which their endings short stories. Two of the chapters (5: Learning and Intelligence, 14: Reality) had interesting excerpts from Smullyan's books Alice in Puzzle-land [1] and Five Thousand B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies [2], respectively. They highlight philosophical concepts in a way that makes them sort of 'self-explanatory', especially for a beginner student. He also has a textbook, Set Theory and the Continuum Problem which is a rigorous and technical work, and does a great job introducing and developing some results on the idea of forcing [3].

[0] Introducción a la Filosofía, César Tejedor.

[1] https://static01.nyt.com/packages/pdf/crossword/Smullyan_Ali... the story is in pp. 1-6

[2] https://books.google.cl/books?id=fzuKc5dGN5gC&lpg=PT80&ots=Q... until the comment of Second Positivist

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing_(mathematics)

my daughter and i have used "what is the name of this book?" and now "to mock a mockingbird" as the first slot in the day for her homeschooling. his books are really wonderful. public schools should be lousy with them.

Nice. I recently bought a copy of his First-Order Logic, which is slim but dense.

Got into a little bit of his work early in uni, which inspired me into logic research and ultimately to me publishing/presenting my research at a conference he also attended. I met him on a boat trip and he was doing coin tricks, at the age of 88. What a character.

I suspect that Smullyan was one of those sages who attained enlightenment by pure thought.