pcfwik

It's actually still accessible from computers on the local Stanford network, so someone could probably forward you a copy of whatever you're looking for. CS department affiliates recently got an email about other sites on the cs.stanford.edu subdomain not being accessible from off-campus. That email included a note "Our team is aware of the issue and is actively working toward a solution to restore access for off-campus". Unsure if it's related to recent vulnerabilities, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Separately, I know Knuth has recently mentioned drowning under a sea of (presumably LLM-found) bugs in TAOCP, so I suspect it might lead to a slight (if accidental) reprieve :)

If this suggestion were to come to pass, I wonder how new math PhDs would think about choosing between a 'normal' R1 faculty job vs. the "teaching route" (teaching professorships, lectureships, community college professorships, or SLAC professorships).

It's been my understanding that traditionally the ones who care about "motivated explanations" in this sense go for the latter, but if the research community has now decided they care about teaching and understanding, it might "even the playing field" and make the jobs more similar.

Agreed that logic isn't a branch of mathematics (even today, my experience has been that logic classes tend to be offered by philosophy departments, not math). My only quibble was the implication that logic is somehow much newer than mathematics (/Euclid). It's not like people suddenly woke up one day in the 20th century and thought for the first time: "huh, I wonder what separates correct arguments from incorrect ones?" But point taken that Aristotle was not as formalist in his time.

If you have some sources to read more about this:

> I get the impression that a lot of more traditional philosophers of logic hated the formal turn.

I would be very interested! (Don't doubt it at all, just sounds like an interesting period I don't know as much about as I'd like.)

I broadly agree with your sentiment and am saddened (outraged?) to see the financially motivated cheapening of (destruction of?) what mathematics truly is. I agree that formal logic is merely a model of one aspect of what mathematicians do, in the same sense that a computer simulation of a roller coaster can never bring the same value to us as the real thing.

However, I would be remiss if I didn't question your historical claim, which seems to me a bit too strong:

> Mathematics predates the idea of formal proof by millenia [...] Formal proof only emerged early in the 20th century [...]

You seem to associate the start of "Mathematics" with Euclid, but (as far as I know) he worked at approximately the same time as Aristotle. Aristotle's syllogisms are perhaps the most famous formal logic system: their correctness relates only to their form, not their content. All deductions of the form "All X are Y, All Z are X, hence All Z are Y" are valid (assuming the premises are), regardless of the meanings of X, Y, and Z. (Outside of Greece, my understanding is that a few hundred years earlier Panini had also developed a system of formal manipulations, but for representing grammars.)

What, to my understanding, "emerged" only the 19th and 20th century was 'merely' a formal logic both expressive and sound enough to properly express modern mathematics (the Beggriffsschrift in the 19th century and FOL+ZFC in the 20th). Between Euclid and the 19th century the development of calculus was probably the biggest advance in mathematics, and my understanding is that Leibniz himself spent significant time working on formal logic.

Perhaps I have the wrong definition in mind of 'formal logic' or 'mathematics,' but I do think the history of formal logic is much more closely tied to the history of mathematics than your post makes it seem on first glance. Though I certainly agree that "mainstream mathematics" has never felt it necessary (or necessarily that useful) to express proofs in a formal logic carefully enough that they could be checked by computers; this was a fringe focus of a minority group of mathematicians and computer scientists that was co-opted as a marketing stunt into 'what mathematics is' for major corporations trying to justify their money burn.