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European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information
                   August 4 - 15, 2008
             http://events.illc.uva.nl/ESSLLI2008/
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                    Newsletter no. 21
                    3 September 2008
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Dear subscribers of the ESSLLI newsletter:

 Two weeks ago, ESSLLI 2008 was held in Hamburg, and we
would like to thank everyone involved in this great summer
school: the lecturers who volunteered to teach at the
school, all of our student helpers, and --last but not
least-- all participants who made ESSLLI 2008 so enjoyable.

 Of course, as with every ESSLLI, there will be a formal
evaluation of our event. However, a lot of people used the
final days of the school or sent us e-mails right afterwards
in order to give us their personal assessment of what they
liked about ESSLLI 2008. Among these statements, there were
a number of recurring points. Apparently, what people liked
about ESSLLI 2008 was

 (a) the high quality of the lectures and workshops,
 (b) the lecturing facilities in the main building ESA1,
 (c) the constant stream of coffee and cookies,
 (d) the watermelons,
 (e) the music.

 FoLLI president Michael Moortgat said during one of the
'Sommerabendvorlesungen' that music formed the theme of
ESSLLI 2008. The organizers only provided the infrastructure
for this theme; it was you, the participants of ESSLLI 2008,
who used it to full effect and gave us the pleasure of a
semi-secret Schubert recital and many other musical
highlights. We hope that music will continue to play a role
in future ESSLLIs; to say it in the words of the German
traveller and writer Johann Gottfried Seume:

  "Wo man singet, lass dich ruhig nieder,
   Ohne Furcht, was man im Lande glaubt;
   Wo man singet, wird kein Mensch beraubt;
   Bösewichter haben keine Lieder."
   (from 'Die Gesänge, 1804')

ESSLLI Statistics. ESSLLI 2008 had 459 participants from 43
countries. The biggest national delegations were Germany (21%),
the Netherlands (17%), the United Kingdom (11%), France (9%),
Italy (7%) and the USA (6%). Other double digit delegations
were Japan (11 participants), South Korea and Belgium (10
participants each). 31.5% of the participants were female.

LOST AND FOUND. After ESSLLI 2008, a number of items were left
in the "Lost and Found" box at the registration desk. We took
them with us to Amsterdam. You can find pictures of the
remaining nine items at
   http://events.illc.uva.nl/ESSLLI2008/Photos/lostfound/.
If any of these objects belong to you, please send an e-mail
to esslli2008@science.uva.nl with your postal address and we'll
mail it to you.

ESSLLI Photos. We took a large number of pictures during ESSLLI
2008 which you can find at
   http://events.illc.uva.nl/ESSLLI2008/photos.html.
Please enjoy; if you have your own photos to add, please e-mail
them to us. Also, if you object to one of the pictures being on
the ESSLLI webpage, send us an e-mail and we'll take the picture
off the page.  If you would like high resolution copies of any
of the pictures, contact Sara at S.L.Uckelman@uva.nl.

ESSLLI Evaluations. The ESSLLI Standing Committee is doing an
online evaluation of ESSLLI 2008. Right after this newsletter,
we'll be sending out the URL of the evaluation form to all
registered participants of ESSLLI 2008. We would like to ask
all participants to fill in these forms in order to give feedback
that will help the organizers and the PC of future ESSLLIs.

Once again, we'd like to thank everyone who helped make ESSLLI
2008 such a success.