Alonzo Church

(1903 - 1995)

AlonzoChurch studied at Princeton, receiving his first degree in 1924 and his doctorate three years later. His doctoral work was supervised by Veblen, and he was awarded his doctorate for his dissertation entitled Alternatives to Zermelo's Assumption.

Church spent a year at Harvard University, then a year at Göttingen. He returned to the United States, becoming professor of mathematics at Princeton in 1929, a post he held until 1967, when he became professor of mathematics and philosophy at California. His work is of major importance in mathematical logic, recursion theory and in theoretical computer science. He created the LambdaCalculus in the 1930's, which today is an invaluable tool for computer scientists.

He is best remembered for Church's Theorem (1936), which shows that there is no decision procedure for arithmetic. It appears in An unsolvable problem in elementary number theory, published in the American Journal of Mathematics 58 (1936), 345-363. His work extended that of KurtGoedel.

Church founded the Journal of Symbolic Logic in 1936 and remained an editor until 1979. He wrote the book Introduction to Mathematical Logic in 1956.

He had 31 doctoral students, including AlanTuring, Kleene, Kemeny and RaymondSmullyan.

See also the ZerothChurchOfAlonzo.

Penn State philosophy professor DaleJacquette claims both Church's Theorem and GoedelsIncompletenessTheorem can be "neutralized", in his book MeinongianLogic.

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