Author Archives: Bill Wadge

The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite~ Georg Cantor Recently NETFLIX released a documentary on mathematical concept of infinity, titled A Trip to Infinity. NETFLIX’s trip is a bad … Continue reading →

Art is what you can get away with.– Marshall McLuhan [All the images in this post were produced with generative AI – Midjourney,DALL-E 2, Stable diffusion.] I’d like to give you my thoughts on the recent amazing developments in AI (Artificial … Continue reading →

Everyone’s all, “Wow, chatGPT, amazing, a real milestone, everything will change from now on”. And they’re right – but probably don’t realize that this is not the first time something like this has happened. In fact there’s been wave after … Continue reading →

I am a computer scientist (emeritus professor at the University of Victoria, Canada) with a part-time interest in rhetoric. I’m going to give you a quick tutorial in using a formula devised by Marcus Tullius Cicero. It will make articles … Continue reading →

Everyone’s heard about chatGPT, the latest and most sophisticated chatbot to date.We all know it can bs proficiently about ‘soft’ topics like English literature. I decided to quiz it about a hard topic, mathematics. As you probably know, I have … Continue reading →

The axiom of choice (AC) seems harmless enough. It says that given a family of non empty sets, there is a choice function that assigns to each set an element of that set. AC is practically indispensable for doing modern … Continue reading →

Power concedes nothing without a demand. -Frederick Douglass When the late Ed Ashcroft and I invented Lucid, we had no idea what we were getting in for.

Recently I was invited to give a 1-hour tutorial at the Computing in Topological Structures workshop (CTS 2022) held partially by zoom and in person in Sochi, Russia. Here are the slides plus some commentary. The whole talk turned into … Continue reading →

Recently I was invited to give a 1-hour tutorial at the Computing in Topological Structures workshop (CTS 2022) held partially by zoom and in person in Sochi, Russia. Here is the second part, about programming in Lucid. It will be … Continue reading →

When Ed Ashcroft and I invented Lucid, we intended it be a general purpose language like Pascal (very popular at the time.) Pascal had while loops and we managed to do iteration with equations. However in Pascal you can nest … Continue reading →