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Alonzo Church | |
|---|---|
 Alonzo Church (1903–1995) | |
| Born | June 14, 1903 Washington, D.C., US |
| Died | August 11, 1995 (aged 92) Hudson, Ohio, US |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Princeton University |
| Known for | Lambda calculus Simply typed lambda calculus Church encoding Church's theorem Church–Kleene ordinal Church–Turing thesis Frege–Church ontology Church–Rosser theorem Intensional logic |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics, logic |
| Institutions | Princeton University (1929–67) UCLA (1967–95) |
| Thesis | Alternatives to Zermelo's Assumption (1927) |
| Doctoral advisor | Oswald Veblen |
| Doctoral students | C. Anthony Anderson 1977 Peter Andrews 1964 Bijan Arbab 1988 George Alfred Barnard 1936 James Bennett 1962 William W. Boone 1952 Enrique Bustamente-Llaca 1944 Edward Chapin 1970 Donald Collins 1967 Aubert Daigneault 1959 Martin Davis 1950 William Easton 1964 Alfred Foster 1930 James Guard 1961 Leon Henkin 1947 Gustav Hensel 1963 David Kaplan John George Kemeny 1949 Stephen Cole Kleene 1934 Simon B. Kochen 1959 Maurice L'Abbé 1951 Isaac (Richard) Malitz 1976 Gary R. Mar 1985 Gerald Massey 1964 Michael O. Rabin 1957 Nicholas Rescher 1951 Wayne Richter 1963 Robert Ritchie 1960 Joel Robbin 1965 Hartley Rogers, Jr 1952 J. Barkley Rosser 1934 Dana Scott 1958 Norman Shapiro 1955 Raymond Smullyan 1959 Alan Turing 1938[1] Robert Winder 1962 |
Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, Church–Turing thesis, proving the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem, Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem. He also worked on philosophy of language (see e.g. Church 1970). Alongside Alan Turing, Church has been considered one of the founders of computer science.[2][3]
Alonzo Church was born on June 14, 1903, in Washington, D.C., where his father, Samuel Robbins Church, was the judge of the Municipal Court for the District of Columbia. The family later moved to Virginia after his father lost this position because of failing eyesight. With help from his uncle, also named Alonzo Church, the son attended the private Ridgefield School for Boys in Ridgefield, Connecticut.[4] After graduating from Ridgefield in 1920, Church attended Princeton University, where he was an exceptional student. He published his first paper on Lorentz transformations and graduated in 1924 with a degree in mathematics. He stayed at Princeton for graduate work, earning a Ph.D. in mathematics in three years under Oswald Veblen.
He married Mary Julia Kuczinski in 1925. The couple had three children, Alonzo Church, Jr. (1929), Mary Ann (1933) and Mildred (1938).
After receiving his Ph.D., he taught briefly as an instructor at the University of Chicago.[5] He received a two-year National Research Fellowship that enabled him to attend Harvard University in 1927–1928, and the University of Göttingen and University of Amsterdam the following year.
He taught philosophy and mathematics at Princeton for nearly four decades, 1929–1967. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1967–1990. He was a Plenary Speaker at the ICM in 1962 in Stockholm.[6]
He received honorary Doctor of Science degrees from Case Western Reserve University in 1969,[7]Princeton University in 1985,[8] and the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York in 1990 in connection with an international symposium in his honor organized by John Corcoran.[9]
A deeply religious person, Church was a lifelong member of the Presbyterian church.[10] He died in 1995 and was buried in Princeton Cemetery.
Church is known for the following significant accomplishments:
The lambda calculus emerged in his 1936 paper showing the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem. This result preceded Alan Turing's work on the halting problem, which also demonstrated the existence of a problem unsolvable by mechanical means. Church and Turing 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." This resulted in the Church–Turing thesis.
The efforts for automatically generating a controller implementation from specifications originates from his ideas.[12]
The lambda calculus influenced the design of the LISP programming language and functional programming languages in general. The Church encoding is named in his honor.
In his honor the Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation was established in 2015 by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group for Logic and Computation (ACM SIGLOG), the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL), and the Kurt Gödel Society (KGS). The award is for an outstanding contribution to the field published within the past 25 years and must not yet have received recognition via another major award, such as the Turing Award, the Paris Kanellakis Award, or the Gödel Prize.[13][14]
Church’s elaboration of a methodology involving the logistic method, his philosophical criticisms of nominalism and his defense of realism, his argumentation leading to conclusions about the theory of meaning, and the detailed construction of the Fregean and Russellian intensional logics, are more than sufficient to place him high up among the most important philosophers of this century.
— C. Anthony Anderson[15]
Many of Church's doctoral students have led distinguished careers, including C. Anthony Anderson, Peter B. Andrews, George A. Barnard, David Berlinski, William W. Boone, Martin Davis, Alfred L. Foster, Leon Henkin, John G. Kemeny, Stephen C. Kleene, Simon B. Kochen, Maurice L'Abbé, Isaac Malitz, Gary R. Mar, Michael O. Rabin, Nicholas Rescher, Hartley Rogers, Jr., J. Barkley Rosser, Dana Scott, Raymond Smullyan, and Alan Turing.[16] A more complete list of Church's students is available via Mathematics Genealogy Project.
A deeply religious person, he was a lifelong member of the Presbyterian church.
By: Wikipedia.org
Edited: 2021-06-18 17:50:06
Source: Wikipedia.org
