[HM] Motivations of Turing, Church, Kleene, Post
Robert Tragesser (RTragesser@compuserve.com)
Sun, 1 Nov 1998 15:58:32 -0500
One has long heard rather routinely -- often in support of
Church's Thesis or just as a remarkable fact -- that Church, Turing,
Kleene, Post, . . each set out to give an informal analysis of
"computable function", and each ended characterizing a class equivalent
to the recursive functions.
Reading through the relevant papers in M.Davis' anthology The
Undecidable, I am struck by how far from the truth this
characterization of intentions seems. If they were _not_ all (in some
sufficiently strong sense) consciously intending to analyze "computable
function" -- WERE THEY??? --, then what significance is properly
attached to their coming to "the same class" of functions?
Robert Tragesser
West(Running)Brook, Connecticut 06498