Introduction

Summary

The year 2006 marked the centennial of Kurt Gödel, who was born on 28 April 1906. The importance of Gödel's work for nearly all areas of logic and foundations of mathematics hardly needs to be explained to our readers.

The year 2006 saw several centennial observances. In particular, the program committee for the 2006 Association for Symbolic Logic annual meeting, which took place on 17–21 May at the Université du Québec à Montréal, commissioned a subcommittee to arrange a portion of the program that would commemorate the Gödel centennial. The subcommittee arranged three one-hour lectures, by Jeremy Avigad, Sy-David Friedman, and Akihiro Kanamori. It also arranged a two-hour special session on Gödel's philosophy of mathematics, with lectures by Steve Awodey, John Burgess, and William Tait. All of the lectures have led to papers in this volume. The volume contains one other new paper, “The Gödel hierarchy and reverse mathematics,” by Stephen G. Simpson. Other papers included in the volume are reprinted, in all but one case from The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. We have included the papers presented at the 2004 ASL annual meeting at Carnegie-Mellon University, in a special session organized by the editors of Gödel's Collected Works, by Martin Davis, John W. Dawson, Jr., Cheryl A. Dawson, Solomon Feferman, Warren Goldfarb, Donald A. Martin, Wilfried Sieg, and William Tait. These appeared in the June 2005 Bulletin. Also reprinted are papers by Mark van Atten and Juliette Kennedy and by Charles Parsons that appeared in earlier issues of the Bulletin, as well as a paper by Peter Koellner that appeared in Philosophia Mathematica.