If you have never read it before, “On the Building Blocks of Mathematical Logic”[1] is incredibly readable given that it's talking pure theory and trying to do

If you have never read it before, “On the Building Blocks of Mathematical Logic”[1] is incredibly readable given that it's talking pure theory and trying to do something quite remarkable. Basically it teaches you to remove variables from arbitrary logic expressions, including logic expressions that have existential and universal quantification, and just represent them with a couple of fixed symbols (you can get it down to 2, which if you were so inclined you could call 0 and 1). That's a pretty lofty goal and Schönfinkel just baby-steps you into it, “you know how NAND gates (the Sheffer stroke) work and can make any other boolean circuit by making AND and NOT and OR the following ways? Cool. Here’s how we can extend that idea to ‘there exists X such that...’ and here is how you curry functions and use the Applicative functor for functions in practice to remove multiple calls of the same argument, and with those you can write anything point-free and do away with arguments and symbols altogether.” At the end of reading it, there is simultaneously a sense of epiphany and a sense of confused scope, like when you've been walking up a mountain all day and you turn around and you don't really believe that you have gotten as high as you have gotten, every step was reasonable and the sum total is unreasonable. Well worth the reading time. [1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/12/Schonfinkel-OnTheBuildingBlocksOfMathematicalLogic.pdf https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2020/12/Sch...