Deriving a Quine in a Lisp

As with my previous post, this post is another excerpt that will be included in my final Master’s thesis, but I decided it is interesting enough to post it on its own.

We start with a definition of diagonalization (or quotation), as discussed in The Gödelian Puzzle Book:

Definition 1: For an expression P in which a variable x occurs, we say that its diagonalization D(P(x)) is the substitution of the variable x with the quoted expression P(x).

This definition allows us to represent self-referential expressions.

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Introduction and formalization of Boolean algebra

Recently I’ve been teaching my friend boolean algebra for their exams at university. Some exercises included simplifying boolean expressions. While teaching them, I noticed that we mostly relied on the transformation rules and almost mechanically simplified expressions (M of MIU, remember? :))

In this post, we will formalize this algebra and prove some properties about it.

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