Abstract
Alonzo Church was an American mathematician and logician who made important contributions to mathematical logic and to theoretical computer science. He developed the lambda calculus in the 1930s as a tool to study computability, and he showed that anything that is computable is computable by the lambda calculus. He proved that the first-order logic is undecidable (i.e. there is no algorithm to determine whether an arbitrary mathematical proposition is true or false). He founded the Journal of Symbolic Logic in 1936.
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Notes
- 1.
The Church-Turing thesis states that anytime that is computable is computable by lambda calculus or equivalently by a Turing machine.
- 2.
This essentially expresses that the names of bound variables is unimportant.
- 3.
This essentially expresses the idea of function application.
- 4.
This expresses the idea that two functions are equal if and only if they give the same results for all arguments.
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© 2013 Springer-Verlag London
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O’Regan, G. (2013). Alonzo Church. In: Giants of Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5340-5_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5340-5_15
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