This project funds travel awards to graduate students in logic to support their participation in meetings of the Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) and those sponsored by the Association. The two main meetings of the Association, arguably the most important meetings in the field of logic, are the North American Annual Meeting and the European Summer Meeting (also known as the Logic Colloquium). The Association also meets annually at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, where it typically co-sponsors one or more events with the American Mathematical Society and/or the Mathematical Association of America, and on a rotating basis with one of the three divisions of the American Philosophical Association. ASL-sponsored meetings are held throughout the world. The Association works to ensure that its meetings and those it sponsors cover logic and its applications comprehensively, and that they represent the highest quality work being done in the field. They accordingly provide important opportunities for serious intellectual exchange, thereby serving as a stimulus to advancement of research. For graduate students in logic, the opportunity to attend any of these meetings is a vital component of their training and subsequent entry into the profession.
The Association for Symbolic Logic is the leading international professional society for logicians, whose membership includes researchers in computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. It organizes and sponsors a number of important meetings. Most prominent among these are its North American Annual Meeting and European Summer Meeting, both held annually. Recent sponsored meetings have taken place in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. The Association has actively sought to increase the range and number of meetings that it sponsors, a particular aim of which is to embrace new and emerging fields in which logic has come to play an important role, including computer science, linguistics, and cognitive science. This project will permit the continuation and appropriate expansion of a successful program of graduate student travel awards that the Association has administered since 1993 and that has been partially funded by NSF since 1997. The program has proved to be a highly effective means of bringing students in logic to important professional meetings at which they can meet and exchange ideas with leading logicians, as well as present papers on their original research. Approximately eighty-four percent of the awards funded by N.S.F. during the period 1998-2005 (the first N.S.F.-supported awards were made in 1998) went to students who subsequently have earned their Ph.D.'s in logic. Many of these awardees have obtained excellent postdoctoral and permanent positions. Several of the early award recipients already have served on ASL or ASL-sponsored meeting program committees and have been appointed to standing committees of the Association. Further information on the Association may be found on its web site: www.aslonline.org.
This award to the Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) partially supports a program of travel grants to logic students to assist them in attending the two principal annual meetings of the Association: the ASL North American Annual Meeting, normally a four day meeting held in the spring on a university campus in North America, and the ASL European Summer Meeting (also known as the Logic Colloquium), usually a week to ten day long meeting held during the summer on a university campus in Europe. The ASL Annual Meeting and the European Summer Meeting are arguably the most important meetings in the field of logic. Since their inception, they have been international scientific meetings of the highest standard. They accordingly have provided important opportunities for intellectual exchange, thus acting as a stimulus to advancement of research. For graduate students in logic, the opportunity to attend one or both of these ASL meetings is a highly important component of serious participation in the profession. The Association for Symbolic Logic, the administrative organization for this project, is the leading professional society for logicians in the world. Charles Steinhorn in his capacity as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Symbolic Logic, was responsible for administering the travel grant program that was supported by the award. The selection of student travel award recipients for the Annual Meeting and the European Summer Meeting is made by the Program Committees of the meetings, led by the Program Committee Chair. In addition to the two main meetings of the ASL, the Association also meets annually at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, where it typically co-sponsors one or more events with the American Mathematical Society and/or the Mathematical Association of America, and, on a rotating basis, with one of the three divisions of the American Philosophical Association. The ASL sponsors meetings throughout the world in which logic and its applications are central. Student ASL members are eligible to apply for ASL-funded travel support to participate in these meetings. The ASL-sponsored meetings held since the last annual report for this award were: Eighth Scandinavian Logic Symposium 2012 (Denmark); East-Asian School on Logic, Language, and Computation (EASLLC 2012) (China); Nineteenth Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation (WoLLIC'2012) (Argentina); Fifth Indian Conference on Logic and its Applications (ICLA 2013) (India); Fourth World Congress and School on Universal Logic (UNILOG 2013) (Brazil); Logic and Interactions (France); Sixth Young Set Theory Workshop (Italy); Model Theory 2013 (Italy); Twenty-eighth Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2013) (USA); Computability in Europe 2013 (CiE 2013): The Nature of Computation: Logic, Algorithms, Applications (Italy); Topology, Algebra and Categories in Logic (TACL) (USA); Twenty-fifth European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI-2013) (Germany); Twentieth Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation (WoLLIC'2013) (Germany); Eighth International Conference on Computability, Complexity and Randomness (CCR 2013) (Russia); Large Cardinals and Forcing and Descriptive Set Theory (Vienna); and the The Andrzej Mostowski Centenary Conference (Mostowski 100) (Poland). Increasing the visibility and presence of logic outside North America and Europe is one of the ASL's highest long-term priorities. In 2007, ongoing funding was authorized by the ASL Council for two highly successful meetings that the ASL has regularly sponsored: the biannual Asian Logic Conference (ALC) and the biannual Simposio Latinamericano de Logica Matematica (SLALM), partially supported by this NSF award. It is hoped that these meetings may soon move from ASL-sponsored status to become official ASL regional meetings. During the period of this award, a total of ninety-seven grants were made to graduate students to attend a North American Annual Meeting and thirty-seven were awarded to graduate students to attend a Logic Colloquium. Of the total of 134 awardees, forty-two presented contributed papers at the conference for which the travel grant was awarded. Nine other awardees were invited to speak in an ASL special session at the meeting for which the travel grant was awarded. It is unusual for a graduate student to be invited to speak a special session, and it is impressive that these grantees were asked to present their research in such a session. Abstracts of all the contributed and special session papers are published in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, one of the ASL's three official journal publications. The ASL has compiled data on the recipients of its NSF-funded travel awards and tracked their progress in their studies to assess the success of this component of its travel award program. Of the 317 ASL travel awards made with NSF funds from 1998--2010, 270 were made tostudents who now have been awarded Ph.D.'s, and many of theseindividuals have obtained excellent postdoctoral or permanent appointments. (Note: the 2011--2013 awards are not included because many of the students who received awards are still in graduate school and thus would skew this statistic.)
