Announcements

The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic was founded 25 years ago. Over the past 25 years, the BSL has published many expository papers of outstanding quality, on a variety of topics, and from a variety of perspectives within logic. These papers have helped students to get started, they have allowed researchers to see connections between different areas, and they have let all of us see some of the history of our subject.

To celebrate, and to advertise the BSL, we are giving a special BSL 25th Anniversary Prize. Here is the list of winning papers from the first 25 years of the BSL:

Jeremy Avigad, "Forcing in proof theory,'' 10(3):305-333, 2004.

Akihiro Kanamori, "The mathematical development of set theory from Cantor to Cohen,'' 2(1):1-71, 1996.

Colin McLarty, "What does it take to prove Fermat's last theorem,'' 16(3):359-377, 2010.

Yiannis N. Moschovakis, "Kleene's amazing second recursion theorem,'' 16(2):189-239, 2010.

Christian Rosendal, "Automatic continuity of group homomorphisms,'' 15(2):184-214, 2009.

Thomas Scanlon, "Diophantine geometry from model theory,'' 7(1):37-57, 2001.

Richard Zach, "Completeness before Post,'' 5(3):331-366, 1999.

The winning papers were chosen by a panel of distinguished logicians, all with significant BSL experience: Patricia Blanchette, Alexander Kechris, Martin Otto, Michael Rathjen, Richard Shore, and Frank Wagner (chair).

Two further papers published in BSL have won the Shoenfield Prize:

Bohuslav Balcar and Thomas Jech, “Weak distributivity, a problem of Von Neumann and the mystery of measurability,” 12 (2): 241-266, 2006.

Rod Downey, Denis Hirschfeldt, Andrew Nies, and Sebastiaan Terwijn, “Calibrating randomness,” 12 (3): 411-49, 2006.

These were excluded from consideration for the anniversary prize.

For more information and to access the winning papers, see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bulletin-of-symbolic-logic/25th-anniversary-prize.

In February 2021, JSTOR revised its login procedures for members of organizations such as the ASL. To comply, the ASL is transitioning to a new member access program for JSL and BSL content in JSTOR. Rather than receiving individual accounts directly through JSTOR, ASL members will use a shared institutional login which will be updated annually.

For the login credentials, please contact Shannon Miller at asl@uconn.edu.

Walsh received his Ph.D. in 2020 from the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of Paolo Mancosu and Antonio Montalban. His thesis, "Reflection Principles and Ordinal Analysis", presents significant new results on the philosophical and conceptual foundations of proof theory. It identifies natural classes of theories that rule out pathological behaviors that can otherwise arise in ordinal analysis, and it makes important progress towards explaining why proof-theoretic results tend to be robust with respect to the kinds of theories that occur naturally in mathematics.

The 2021 Abel Prize Laureates are László Lovász (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics and Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary) and Avi Wigderson (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA). The Norwegian Academy of Sciences chose the Laureates "for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics." For more information, see the Abel Prize website at https://www.abelprize.no.

As a consequence of a ruling of the administrative tribunal dated 25 January, 2021, Tuna Altınel's passport has been returned to him, with no restrictions, and on 11 June 2021, he returned to Lyon, France. The ruling is not final yet as the Balıkesir Authority has appealed it. But for the time being and under Turkish law, the legal state of affairs is that Tuna holds a valid passport.

Applications are now open for the Claytor-Gilmer Fellowship, created by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) to further excellence in mathematical research and to help generate wider and sustained participation by Black mathematicians. The application deadline is July 25, 2021 for this inaugural fellowship. The recipient may use it in the 2021-2022 academic year or defer to 2022-2023. Find out more here: https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=6712.

One award will be conferred annually in the amount of $50,000. The most likely awardee will be a mid-career Black mathematician, based at a US institution, whose achievements demonstrate significant potential for further contributions to mathematics. Awardees may use the fellowship in any way that most effectively enables their research—for instance, for release time, participation in special research programs, travel support, childcare, etc.

The fellowship honors Dr. William Shieffelin Claytor and Dr. Gloria Ford Gilmer, who made significant contributions to mathematics scholarship and could have accomplished even more were it not for the racism they faced.

William Shieffelin Claytor, PhD (1908-1967) was the first African American man to publish a research article in a peer-reviewed mathematics journal, with a paper on topology in the Annals of Mathematics. He was the third African American to earn a PhD in mathematics (University of Pennsylvania, 1933). He earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in mathematics at Howard University. After his PhD, he taught at West Virginia State College where one of his students was Katherine Johnson (of Hidden Figures fame). Dr. Claytor's passion for research was diminished by racist attitudes and incidents. This history is recounted in an AMS report. Dr. Claytor spent the majority of his career at Howard University where he also became department chair. He is recognized by the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) in their annual Claytor-Woodard Lecture at the Joint Mathematics Meetings.

Gloria Ford Gilmer, PhD (1928- ) is the first African American woman to have published mathematics research articles in peer-reviewed journals, with papers on differential equations in the Proceedings of the AMS and the Pacific Journal of Mathematics. Dr. Ford Gilmer earned her undergraduate degree from Morgan State University and taught at six different HBCUs after earning a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. Later in life she earned a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from Marquette University. She was the first Black woman on the board of governors of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and also served as a research associate with the US Department of Education. A leader in the field of ethnomathematics, she was the second person and the first woman to give NAM's Cox-Talbot Lecture.