I look forward to welcoming you, and I hope that you will find the events both interesting and enlightening. In the modern world we rely on more and more complex and automated systems which affect every area of our daily lives from airplanes to factories. Automated systems are continually developing and becoming increasingly more sophisticated. To ensure reliability and safety, we use various forms of formal reasoning, from logic and set theory to type theory. For over a century, mathematicians have been seeking formal systems that are reliable and sufficient for our needs.
Inconsistency is an ever-present danger.
As recently as the 1970s, important systems were shown to be inconsistent, and there are also difficulties with expressiveneness. In the 1930s, Goedel proved that there are true statements of arithmetic which cannot be proven in any consistent formal system. In her lecture, Professor Kamareddine, Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering, will survey her past and present vision and work on finding reliable and expressive formal systems during her journey from Maths to Computer Science and Informatics.