Computational Logic

Handbook of the History of Logic brings to the development of logic the best in modern techniques of historical and interpretative scholarship. Computational logic was born in the twentieth century and evolved in close symbiosis with the advent of the first electronic computers and the growing importance of computer science, informatics and artificial intelligence. With more than ten thousand people working in research and development of logic and logic-related methods, with several dozen international conferences and several times as many workshops addressing the growing richness and diversity of the field, and with the foundational role and importance these methods now assume in mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, law and many engineering fields where logic-related techniques are used inter alia to state and settle correctness issues, the field has diversified in ways that even the pure logicians working in the early decades of the twentieth century could have hardly anticipated.

Logical calculi, which capture an important aspect of human thought, are now amenable to investigation with mathematical rigour and computational support and fertilized the early dreams of mechanised reasoning: “Calculemus”. The Dartmouth Conference in 1956 – generally considered as the birthplace of artificial intelligence – raised explicitly the hopes for the new possibilities that the advent of electronic computing machinery offered: logical statements could now be executed on a machine with all the far-reaching consequences that ultimately led to logic programming, deduction systems for mathematics and engineering, logical design and verification of computer software and hardware, deductive databases and software synthesis as well as logical techniques for analysis in the field of mechanical engineering. This volume covers some of the main subareas of computational logic and its applications.