A Profile of Mathematical Logic (Dover Books on Mathematics)

A great summary of the

The fact that Delong is a philosopher rather than a mathematician is a big plus. The same thing holds beautifully for "Introduction to Logic" by Patrick Suppes.

This book is a solid read for the interested layperson. I found myself going through the references to fill in the gaps in my education.

De Long's overview of Mathematical Logic is not only inspiring (for those of us who wish to study mathematical logic further), but also clarifying. Beginning with the "history" of logic and its relation to mathematics is helpful. Even his treatment and explanation of Goedel's work is compelling and thorough. This is an essential read for anyone interested in mathematics, logic, and philosophy.

An extensive presentation of the subject. This book covers a lot of topics. In almost every topic treated, if you search again and again, all you need to understand is in the text. But the text is written in a verbose style and doesn't highlights clearly the definitions. Therefore you need to search, wasting a lot of time. Indeed the text is very interesting and entertaining. The exercises and their answers indeed are really good and are an indissociable part of the book. Because of its lack of precision, you need to read and reread even simple subjects or to read the topic other books well structured. I feel that the author failed on writing in a style appropriate to ML. It's obvious that the book were publicated before a frantic effort of rewriting and improving was made. There is no good index, no in situ bibliographic footnotes. The bibliography at the end of the book is not really useful because of this. This book remained as a sketch, at several steps before finished publication. It would be nice if someone would made a new remastered edition. In comparison with books well written as the books of W.V.O Quine or Stephen Kleene or Raymond Smullian, Graham Priest, Boolos, I cannot say that PML is good work. If you don't want to waste time, choose a book with a good finish from authored logicians who have a great educational success. For §20 (The Metatheory of the Propositional Calculus) see Method (WVO Quine) of Logic §10 (Alternational Normal Schemata). For §22 (The Theory of recursive functions) see section 6.1(primitive recursive functions) in Computability and Logic (Boolos and Burgess), much better. For §23 The treatment of the metatheory of predicate calculus it's well done.

This is an excellent overview of the development of mathematical logic. It is so well written and clear. This is a great place to start for anyone interested in the subject. Thank you Mr Delong.

O livro é excelente.