Abstract
The Lambda Calculus has perplexed students of computer science for millennia, rendering many incapable of understanding even the most basic precepts of functional programming. This paper gently introduces the core concepts to the lay reader, assuming only a minimum of background knowledge in category theory, quantum chromodynamics, and paleomagnetism.
In addition, this paper goes on to its main results, showing how the Lambda Calculus can be used to easily prove the termination of Leibniz’ Hailstone numbers for all \(n > 0\), to show that matrix multiplication is possible in linear time, and to guarantee Scottish independence.
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Notes
- 1.
This seriously annoyed Alan Turing who did not win a Turing Award. In response, Turing changed his name to Benedict Cumberbatch and won an Oscar. Oscar didn’t really mind.
- 2.
We acknowledge the pioneering work done by Simon Peyton-Jones rehabilitating this font in presentations. We also admit that “to the best of our knowledge” really means “we haven’t the faintest idea and don’t want to do any research into the matter”. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to ever make such an admission.
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Leather, H., Irgens, J. (2016). The Lambda Calculus: Practice and Principle . In: Lindley, S., McBride, C., Trinder, P., Sannella, D. (eds) A List of Successes That Can Change the World. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9600. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30936-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30936-1_11
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