I did know that, but only because my dad is a philosophy professor and used that in one of his classes when I was little. He infected me with lots of little gems. I'm pretty sure I'm part of a very small group who can remember being five and walking around a cocktail party saying, "P implies Q; P, therefore Q. That's modus ponens!" ... worse, I actually understood what it meant.
Hmmm — I wonder to what extent our geekery overlaps. My dad was an old-skool computer programmer; until some time after I went off to college, the household scratch paper was leftover unpunched punchcards that he'd salvaged from the dumpster at work after the last punched card reader in the building had gone to the junkpile.
He's also a big geek in other ways (language, logic, math, history, gadgets, that kind of thing), of course, and used to encourage me to read things that most people would have thought were completely inappropriate for a child of my age.
Uber.
Geek.
He's also a big geek in other ways (language, logic, math, history, gadgets, that kind of thing), of course, and used to encourage me to read things that most people would have thought were completely inappropriate for a child of my age.
As a result, random, semi-remembered stories about knights and knaves and Achilles and the Tortoise surface from the murky depths of my memory at odd times.
OMG, Raymond Smullyan has a MySpace page. Very cool.