2025-II: Editorial Note

Saturday, Aug 9, 2025

The beauty of the ILLC, and what makes it such a special place, is the diversity of thought. Students and professors from so many different backgrounds and intellectual interests, sharing ideas and …

2025-II: Hints and Solutions to Cryptic Clues

Friday, Aug 29, 2025

Erratum

In the third cryptic clue, “cardinal” should read “radical”.

Hints and solutions

It’s way too early to ask for a hint, let alone for the solutions! Take a walk …

Construct Colimits in a Topos Using Elementary Methods

Monday, Aug 4, 2025

An elementary topos is a category with finite limits, exponentials, and a subobject classifier $t:1\rightarrow\Omega$. We do not know from the definition that a topos has colimits. Surely we have …

Engineering Sexual Orientation

Saturday, Aug 9, 2025

Perhaps Lady Gaga was right - sexual orientation is not our choice: baby, we were born this way. This conception has, after all, done much for the mainstream acceptance of certain queer identities. …

Ingredients and Logic - Is putting pineapple on pizza rational?

Monday, Aug 4, 2025

A MoL dinner

After a week of intense study, four MoL students - $E$, $M$, $S$, and $J$ - met at a renowned Amsterdam pizzeria. The restaurant offered a special deal:

Any group of students …

Mathematical Structures in Programming Languages

Monday, Aug 4, 2025

If you enjoyed the Mathematical Structures in Logic course from last semester, you are going to love Nick’s rebranding for the new year: Mathematical Structures in Programming Languages! …

Mathematicians, list your ingredients!

Saturday, Aug 9, 2025

A wise friend of mine once compared being a constructivist to being a vegetarian: even if you are convinced it is the right choice, it is hard to fully commit to it in practice. As a vegetarian and a …

Merkle Puzzles: How to tell a secret

Saturday, Aug 9, 2025

It is Christmas 1974, in the midst of the cold war, and intelligence officer Alice is trying to reach her asset Bob, who is undercover in Budapest, from her apartment in Amsterdam. She knows Bob has …

Regularity Properties of the Reals and the Axiom of Choice

Saturday, Aug 9, 2025

In this article, we aim to give an introduction to the set theoretic study (Jech 2003) of relation between regularity properties of the reals and the Axiom of Choice. Broadly conceived, regularity …

Rotating Shapes: The long(est) line

Monday, Aug 4, 2025

"The long line is a topological space somewhat similar to the real line, but in a certain sense ›longer‹." To understand this statement, we will firstly do a short recap of topology. A lot of …

The Illogicians' Conversation

Monday, Aug 4, 2025

In this crazy discussion, each speech turn contains a semantically deviant or infelicitous utterance. Can you guess what is causing each oddity?

1. B: Hi Gottlob! In what way are you doing?
2. G: Yes! What …

The Logico-Empirical Foundations of Medieval Witchcraft Ascertainment: A Pythonian Analysis

Monday, Aug 4, 2025

This paper examines the application of proto-scientific methodology in the well-documented medieval inquiry portrayed in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, specifically the “She’s a …

When *if* comes after *then*

Monday, Aug 4, 2025

Suppose you want to tell someone that you believe that the first edition of The Illogician will be a success, provided that the articles in it are well written. You could convey this message in the …