FOM: more on the CTA meeting

[Stephen G Simpson]

Dear FOM and COMP-THY subscribers,

This short message is about the recent meeting ``Computability Theory
and Applications'' (June 13-17, 1999, in Boulder, Colorado).  Let's
call it the CTA meeting for short.

Background: On June 21 I did two FOM postings about my impressions of
the CTA meeting.  Then on June 24 I went abroad for a couple of weeks,
where I didn't have access to e-mail.  Now I am back and I see that
Bob Soare has responded angrily to my FOM postings.  In a day or two I
will respond to some of Bob's comments.

Unfortuntely, Bob didn't post his response on the FOM list.  Instead
he posted it on a different mailing list, Peter Cholak's COMP-THY
list, and he neglected to tell the COMP-THY people where to find my
original FOM remarks, to which he was responding.  I have now
attempted to clean up this mess by creating links to both my original
FOM remarks and Bob's response.  The links are at
<http://www.math.psu.edu/simpson/cta/>.  By the way, Bob has also made
some interesting materials available at his own web site,
<http://cs.uchicago.edu/~soare/lectures/>.

I am sorry that my remarks caused Bob to get upset, but I am glad that
Bob is apparently willing to engage in a serious, public, interactive,
electronic discussion of issues and programs in recursion theory /
computability theory.  I feel that such a discussion will be extremely
valuable.  I hope others will join the discussion.

Let me say now, in case I didn't say so in my earlier FOM remarks,
that the CTA meeting was an extremely good recursion theory meeting.
It was particularly valuable for me because of the somewhat unusual
format, including the emphasis on ``applications'' (to foundations of
mathematics and other related areas), and on open problems.

Best wishes to all,
-- Steve Simpson