Alonzo Church
Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 - August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician who was responsible for some of the foundations of theoretical computer science. Born in Washington, DC, he attended Princeton University as an undergraduate and continued there, completing his PhD in 1927. He became a professor of mathematics at Princeton in 1929.
He is best known for the development of the lambda calculus, his 1936 paper that showed the existence of an "undecidable problem" in it. This result preempted Alan Turing's famous work on the halting problem which also demonstrated the existence of a problem unsolvable by mechanical means. Supervising Turing's doctoral thesis, they then showed that the lambda calculus and the Turing machine used in Turing's halting problem were equivalent in capabilities, and subsequently demonstrated a variety of alternative "mechanical processes for computation" had equivalent computational abilities. This resulted in the Church-Turing thesis, which is also known as Church's Thesis and Turing's Thesis as there is dispute about who proposed it first.
Church's other doctoral students included Stephen Kleene.
Church remained a professor of mathematics at Princeton until 1967, when he moved to California.
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Alan Turing | Calculus | Church | Church's Conjecture | Church's thesis | Church-Rosser theorem | Church-Turing Thesis | Church Turing Thesis | Church integer | Church numeral | Churches | Churchs thesis | Computability Theory | Computation Theory | Computing timeline 500 BC-1949 | Differential calculus | Entscheidungsproblem | Functional language | Functional programming | Functional programming language | Iterative method | Kleene, Stephen Cole | Knights of the Lambda-Calculus | Lambda-calculus | Lambda calculus | Lamda calculus | List of computer scientists | List of logicians | List of mathematical logic topics | List of mathematical topics | List of mathematical topics (A-C) | List of mathematicians | List of mathematics topics | List of people by name: Ch | List of philosophical topics | List of philosophical topics (A-C) | S. C. Kleene | Stephen Cole Kleene | Stephen Kleene | The Church-Turing thesis | Timeline of computing 500 BC-1949 | UCLA | University of California, Los Angeles | University of California at Los Angeles
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