Who they are
David Hilbert’s decision problem asked for a general procedure to determine formal logical validity. It became one of the questions addressed by Turing’s account of computation and Church’s independent work. The timeline includes Hilbert as a mathematical predecessor whose problem helped make the limits of mechanical calculation precise.
His problem supplies the question behind the timeline’s computing milestone, rather than an authorship role in Turing’s paper.
Selected contributions
Selected works
Book · 1928
Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik
Hilbert and Ackermann’s book is a bibliographic entry point into the formal-logic program behind the decision problem. The available catalog verifies the authors and edition; the volume’s arguments were not read in this pass.
Reading scope & citation
Catalog title, authors, 1928 imprint and subject metadata inspected via search retrieval and the page record. A subsequent page-window fetch timed out. Original book contents not read.
In the timeline
Biography sources & portrait credit
- On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem ↗Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society; transcription PDF hosted by University of Oxford
- Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik ↗Bibliothèque nationale de Tunisie; Julius Springer edition
Portrait credit
Unknown photographer. Public domain (Commons file-specific copyright declaration). Via Wikimedia Commons.
Photograph. Cropped to 4:5, resized to 320 × 400 and converted to WebP.
Image source & identification ↗ · Public domain (Commons file-specific copyright declaration) ↗
