Alonzo Church (redirected from Alonzo Church (Mathematician))

(person)

Alonzo Church - A twentieth century mathematician and logician, and one of the founders of computer science. Church invented the lambda-calculus and posited a version of the Church-Turing thesis.

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Church, Alonzo 

Born June 14, 1903, in Washington, D.C. American logician and mathematician.

Church was a professor at Princeton University from 1947 to 1967, when he became a professor of mathematics and philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Church’s works deal with various branches of logic. He developed the notion of separating the concept of function from that of set. In 1936 he advanced the fundamental hypothesis of the theory of computable functions; now known as Church’s thesis, it states that every effectively computable function is general recursive (seeRECURSIVE FUNCTION). In 1935, Church adduced an example of an undecidable queue problem, and in 1936 he proved that the decision problem for predicate calculus is unsolvable. These results greatly influenced the development of mathematical logic. Church also made an important contribution to the development of combinatory logic and carried out research in logical semantics and modal logic.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Vvedenie v matematkheskuiu logiku, vol. 1. Moscow, 1960.