[FOM] ACKERMANN AWARD - Second Call for Submissions

[Andrzej Murawski]

Second Call for Submissions for the ACKERMANN AWARD,
the EACSL Outstanding Dissertation Award for Logic in Computer Science

Deadline for submission, March 31, 2005
================================================================


The EACSL Board decided to launch the

ACKERMANN Award,
the EACSL Outstanding Dissertation Award for Logic in Computer Science.

The ACKERMANN Award will be presented to the recipients
at the annual conference of the EACSL (CSL'xx).
The jury is entitled to give more than one award per year.
The first ACKERMANN Award will be presented at CSL'05.

Submissions
-----------
Eligible for the 2005 ACKERMANN Award are PhD dissertations
in topics specified by the EACSL and LICS conferences,
which were formally accepted as PhD theses at a
university or equivalent institution between
	1.1. 2003 and 31.12. 2004.

The deadline for submission is
	31.3.2005

Submission details follow below.

The Award
---------
The award consists of
- a diploma,
- an invitation to present the thesis at the CSL conference,
- the publication of the abstract of the thesis and the
  laudatio in the CSL proceedings,
- travel support to attend the conference.

Jury
----
The jury consists of seven members,
three of them ex officio, namely the president (J. Makowsky, Haifa)
and the vice-president (D. Niwinski, Warsaw)
of EACSL, and one member of the LICS organizing committee
(S. Abramsky, Oxford).

The other members of the jury are currently
B. Courcelle (Bordeaux)
E. Graedel (Aachen)
M. Hyland (Cambridge)
A. Razborov (Moscow and Princeton)

How to submit
-------------
The candidate or his/her supervisor has to submit
a) the thesis (ps or pdf file);
b) a detailed description (not longer than 20 pages)
   of the thesis in ENGLISH (ps or pdf file);
c) a supporting letter by the PhD advisor and
   two supporting letters by other senior faculty or researchers
   in equivalent positions (in English);
d) a copy of the document asserting that the thesis was accepted
   as a PhD thesis at a recognized University (or equivalent institution)
   and that the candidate has received his/her PhD within
   the specified period;
e) a short CV of the candidate.

Homepage of EACSL:

www.dimi.uniud.it/~eacsl
and
www.cs.technion.ac.il/eacsl

Technical details for submission will be posted
by January 25, 2005.

Questions can be adressed to the head of the Jury
Prof. J.A. Makowsky by e-mail
janos at cs.technion.ac.il


The Jury has the right to declare submissions to be
out of scope or not to meet the requirements.

-------------------------------------------------
Wilhelm Ackermann was born on March 29, 1896
and died on December 24, 1962.

His logic textbook, "Grundzuege der Theoretischen Logik"
written together with David Hilbert and first published
in 1928, was the most influential textbook in the formative
years of mathematical logic. Its fourth edition was published
in 1959. The book was translated into several languages.

Ackermann did not pursue an academic career. Nevertheless
he continued his research work and helped to shape mathematical
logic as a tool of scientific investigations.

His work includes investigations in
a) the consistency of arithmetic and other comprehensive mathematical
systems;
b) strengthening of strict implication;
c) recursive functions;
d) decision problems of predicate logic.

Every Computer Science student knows the Ackermann function,
a recursive function (given by a simple recursive definition)
which is provably not primitive recursive.
But computer scientists are less aware of his other contributions.
Goedel's completeness theorem proves the completeness of the
system presented and proved sound by Hilbert and Ackermann.
Ackermann was also the main contributor to the logical system
known as the epsilon calculus, originally due to Hilbert.
Finally, Ackermann solved the decision problem
for $\exists^* \forall \exists^*$-formulas positively.
As one of the pioneers of logic, he left his mark
in shaping logic and the theory of computation.
Several of his papers discussed topics which were later
further developed in papers presented at the LICS and EACSL
conferences.

Sources:
An obituary, written in English by H. Hermes, appeared in the
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, vol. VIII, No 1-2, April 1967.

Links:
Biographic note written by W. Felscher
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ackermann.html
Biography base
http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Ackermann_Wilhelm.html