My first Black Board Day

Saturday, I participated in my first Black Board Day, an informal annual workshop dedicated to Gödel and organized for the past ten years by the neuroscientist Memming Park and his enthusiastic group of scientist friends. Every year around the time of Gödel's birthday (April 28), they gather for a day of talks and discussions on topics in my research field: mathematical logic. According to workshop rules, all talks must be given, as the namesake suggests, the old fashioned way. (On a side note, we should really consider adopting this policy for the set theory seminar as well.) I first learned about BBDay last year, when I followed a link from a pingback on my blog and saw Memming's post on BBDay 9 held at the University of Texas at Austen. I was super excited to find a bunch of scientists, not even all mathematicians, who like me thought that mathematical logic is very cool. So I left a comment to that effect. Meanwhile, Memming moved to Stonybrook University and BBDay moved with him to New York. This year it was held at Columbia University and I got to tell a very excited group of scientists about nonstandard models of the Peano axioms.

This was an abridged version of the talk I recently gave at VCU (but on black board, of course).

It was a lively day of talks, discussions, and arguments, both mathematical and philosophical, which started out in the classroom and then moved outdoors to partake in the beautiful spring weather.

We talked about the incompleteness theorems, nonstandard models of ${\rm PA}$, Goodstein sequences, the axiom of choice, paradoxes in probability, and much much more! Just as the discussions were wrapping up, we were joined by an unlikely visitor.

For details on the event, check out Memming's post here.