...or actually just my very old icon, who still influences my very new Artificial Intelligence work
Gottlob Frege was a man whose path fitted many descriptions: mathematician, philosopher, or, combining those who: a logician. For those who are less familiar with formal logic, be welcomed within a satisfying epistemologic world where one tries to make sense of making sense. I am someone involved in Artificial Intelligence, linguistics, philosophy and with mathematics as a guilty pleasure. This means I often find myself thinking about knowledge. Mostly about when something can be called knowledge, or true, or verified. Within Artificial Intelligence, a computer reasons from a given knowledge base. But what does this reasoning look like? We humans can simply reason without reasoning about reasoning, but if we expect a computer to do the same, reasoning has to be formalised. Enter Gottlob Frege, the author of Begriffsschrift and Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: eine logisch-mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl. His work combines reasoning and language with mathematics, allowing us future logicians to calculate truth values about statements, based on our beliefs. This elegant system provides hope for anyone who likes to believe Artificial Intelligence can be so much more than (I'm sorry) simple statistics and machine learning. Additionally, Frege was very influential in another combination of two of my favorite subjects: the philosophy of language. His distinction between concept and object (Begriff und Gegenstand) even played a major role in the Media Technology Sciences & Humanities course.