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.

Then you would love “The Tao Is Silent”! I believe this piece appears in the book, but either way it’s very reminiscent.

It is indeed in The Tao Is Silent — Raymond's first popular book and one of his best. There's a recent reading of the dialogue on YouTube by Curt Jaimungal, on the "Theory of Everything" channel: https://youtu.be/P-jh6tRh3Jw

Thanks! I had originally found it in Douglas Hofstadter's & Daniel Dennett's anthology, The Mind's I, which I also strongly recommend to those who haven't heard of it.

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.

Fantastic. I suggest an RSS feed, so that I (for one) will know when new material is added.

Especially since it would truly be an "RSS" feed.

Nice.

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.

Schools certainly are lousy without them.

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

Got it upstairs and it's a treasure. Such a beautiful attitude and joyful playfulness shared with real generosity.

iirc, his philosophy as a teacher was to give his students as much as he could while asking as little as possible from them. refreshingly at odds with most teachers i've had.

I was reading a review of it in Mathematics magazine recently.

My bad, it was a review of A Beginner's Guide to Mathematical Logic, in American Mathematical Monthly.

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.

Running on mind