RE: [OPE] Dialectics for the New Century: geometry and meaning

From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Apr 05 2008 - 15:12:48 EDT


I attended a very interesting seminar by Dominic Widdows on Geometry and
Meaning on Friday.

He is an Aristotelean and Euclidean whose Phd was in Differential
Geometry.
 

He is a Google researcher and is working on similar things to Keith van
Rijksbergen here, but he was an extraordinarily erudite scholar, and is
attempting to found a system of meaning using high dimensional vector
spaces  - roughly Hilbert spaces. Very interesting work as an
alternative to the sort of models for semantics that we are used to
discussing in computer science. Since the maths he uses is very similar
to the maths I use for modelling financial transactions I found it
particularly interesting. 

He is great at relating these current questions that are arising in a
practical way in computing to the ideas of logic and dialectic that
Aristotle had 2400 years ago.

His book is called Geometry and Meaning.

The book is well written - in the sort of style or level that Goedel
Escher Bach was. Very interesting read the first few chapters.

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