Lawrence S. Moss

Indiana University, Bloomington

Professor of Mathematics
Director, Program in Pure and Applied Logic

Adjunct Professor: Computer Science, Informatics, Linguistics, and Philosophy

Member, Programs in Cognitive Science and in Computational Linguistics

Research: Applied Logic

My general area of interest is applied logic: the study of mathematical and conceptual tools for use in computer science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and other areas.

Applied logic is applied mathematics. It is logic looking outward, reaching towards the diverse collection of worlds in which logic is used.

Spring 2013 Class: Coalgebra

Coalgebra is an area of theoretical computer science strongly influenced by category theory, automata theory, and areas of logic close to these. The course will partly be an introduction to coalgebra, using survey papers, a draft of Bart Jacobs' textbook, and some of my notes. And the course will gradually become a seminar-style course where people read papers and present them, and where the students who are working in the area present their own work.

Spring 2013 Work Group: Natural Logic

I am organizing a group of graduate and undergraduate students to learn about and work on topics related to natural logic, the study of logical systems crafted to work on natural language, or something as close to natural language as possible. The logical systems should be decidable and yet be as expressive as possible. Here are some specific goals:
  • implementing the logical systems that we already have
  • further progress on logic related to natural language
  • connections to the world of computational linguistics and natural language processing
  • connections to natural language semantics, and to philosophy of language
Part of the semester will be devoted to learning in a classroom setting, and part will involve student research projects. If you are interested in participating, please let me know.

Fall 2013 Classes (tentative)

My plan is to teach M385/P550 (Modal Logic) and also H305 (Exploring Good and Bad Behavior with Mathematics).