Syllabus
Lectures
Professor
Textbook
Grades
Exams
Class Participation
Honor Principle
Disabilities
Questions
Miscellaneous Comments
Homework Schedule
Syllabus
The course begins with a brief treatment of sentential logic and computability. We then concentrate on first-order logic dealing with issues of soundness, completeness, descriptions of models of theories, and undecidability. For our grand finale, we will prove Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems.Lectures
Professor
My name is Alex McAllister. My office is 411 Bradley Hall and my telephone number is 646-2960. If you need to speak with me, you can come to my office hours, or contact me via e-mail at Alex.McAllister@dartmouth.edu.Textbook
Our textbooks for this course are:- Logic for Mathematicians, Revised Edition which was written by A.G. Hamilton and is published by Cambridge University Press,
- What Is Mathematical Logic?, which was written by J.N. Crossley and is published by Dover Press.
Grades
Your grade for the course will be determined by the following:Exams
The Midterm Exam is scheduled for Tuesday, October 27th from 6:00-8:00 PM in 13 Bradley Hall. Unless reported to me before Labor Day (i.e., by October 5th), a scheduling conflict is not a sufficient excuse to take the exam at any time other than the official time.The Final Exam will occur between December 5th and December 9th at the time and place regularly scheduled by the registrar. If you must make travel plans before the schedule for final exams appears, Do Not make plans to leave Hanover before December 10th. The Final Exam Will Not be given early to accommodate travel plans.
You are expected to attend every class.
You have invested a large sum of money for the opportunity to come to class and
I will invest a large amount of time in preparing for class;
I would like to see none of us wasting the investments we have made.
Also, your total attendance grade will be worth about three quizzes and
unexcused absences will result in a grade of 0.
Reading assignments will be given daily and should be read before coming to class.
For some of my thoughts on reading mathematics texts,
click here.
Quizzes will be administered at the end of class on Monday covering material presented in
lecture the previous week.
They will consist of a couple of questions and should only take 10 - 15 minutes to complete.
If you do the homework for the lectures given the previous week (including Friday's homework),
then you should do fine on the quizzes.
Homework problems will be assigned daily and collected the following class period.
Late homework will not be accepted and a grade of 0 will be assigned
(of course, exceptions can be made for emergencies such as illness, death, natural disasters...).
The solutions you present must be coherent and written in complete sentences whenever possible.
Simply stating answers or turning in garbled, unclear solutions will result in a grade of 0.
For further details consult the
Homework Schedule.
Collaboration on homework is encouraged (and expected),
although, you should first spend some time in individual concentration to gain
the full benefit of the homework. On the other hand, copying is discouraged.
You should not be leaving a study group with your homework ready to be turned in;
write up your solution sets by yourself.
Also, take care in crafting your own proofs. You should be creating clear, coherent arguments.
Use complete English sentences and pay careful attention to the use of logical connectives.
Class Participation
Class participation is an essential part of the course;
mathematics is not a spectator sport.
For this course, class participation consists of class attendance,
reading assignments, quizzes, and homework problems.Honor Principle
Work on all quizzes and exams should be strictly your own.Disabilities
I encourage students with disabilities, including but not limited to disabilities like
chronic diseases, learning disabilities, and psychiatric disabilities,
and students dealing with other exceptional circumstances to come see me after class
or during office hours so that we can make appropriate accommodations.
Also, you should stop by the Academic Skills
Center in Collis Center to register for support services.
Questions
If you have any questions about this syllabus or about the material presented in this course,
come talk to me. Although, I do enjoy mathematics, I am not here just to have fun.
My primary goal is to help you learn and understand model theory.
Your questions are an important part of your learning process, and I can help you find answers.
Miscellaneous Comments
The bulk of the course will be studying formal concepts and proving formal theorems.
Do not get behind; it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to catch up.
Study all the material as it is covered and make sure that you understand it.
Simply remembering it, although necessary, will not be adequate.
