Science · Philosophy
Alonzo Church
Mathematical logician
Who they are
Alonzo Church developed an account of effective calculability independently of Turing’s machine model. Turing’s 1936 paper explicitly recognizes Church’s related result and the equivalence of the two formulations. Church appears here as a contributor to the mathematical limits of computation, with authorship kept separate from the paper in which Turing acknowledged him.
His independent route to undecidability supplies essential context for understanding why the computing milestone extends beyond a single inventor.
Selected contributions
- Developed an independent formulation of effective calculability and a related negative result for the decision problem.Source ↗
Selected works
Academic paper · 1936 · Historical journal article
An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory
Church’s paper is an early publication of his approach to effective calculability and an unsolvability result. It offers the independent route that Turing discusses in his own machine-based treatment.
Reading scope & citation
Fresh indexed catalog metadata established author, title, April 1936 and DOI. Direct CiNii page presented a bot check and JSTOR supplied no readable article text. Subject description is limited to the title and Turing’s inspected discussion.
DOI: 10.2307/2371045
In the timeline
Biography sources
- On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem ↗Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society; transcription PDF hosted by University of Oxford
- An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory ↗American Journal of Mathematics; CiNii Research bibliographic record