Search

The classic book that inspired Alan Turing and helped to lay the foundation for theoretical computer scienceThis book provides a concise introduction to the calculi of lambda-conversion first discovered by Alonzo Church and developed by him in collaboration with his students, S. C. Kleene and J. B. Rosser. The first four chapters present the calculus of lambda-conversion in detail, with subsequent chapters discussing the calculus of λ-K-conversion, the calculus of restricted λ-K-conversion, and the calculus of λ-δ-conversion, as well as the applications of the latter to symbolic logic. Gödel numbers are presented using simplified notation, and the fundamental Church-Rosser consistency theorem is discussed in full. This influential book is one that attracted the interest of Alan Turing—who later completed his PhD under Church's supervision—and is widely credited with helping to usher in the modern age of computer science.Princeton University Press is proud to have published the Annals of Mathematics Studies since 1940. One of the oldest and most respected series in science publishing, it has included many of the most important and influential mathematical works of the twentieth century. The series continues this tradition into the twenty-first century as Princeton looks forward to publishing the major works of the new millennium.

Logic is sometimes called the foundation of mathematics: the logician studies the kinds of reasoning used in the individual steps of a proof. Alonzo Church was a pioneer in the field of mathematical logic, whose contributions to number theory and the theories of algorithms and computability laid the theoretical foundations of computer science. His first Princeton book, The Calculi of Lambda-Conversion (1941), established an invaluable tool that computer scientists still use today. Even beyond the accomplishment of that book, however, his second Princeton book, Introduction to Mathematical Logic, defined its subject for a generation. Originally published in Princeton's Annals of Mathematics Studies series, this book was revised in 1956 and reprinted a third time, in 1996, in the Princeton Landmarks in Mathematics series. Although new results in mathematical logic have been developed and other textbooks have been published, it remains, sixty years later, a basic source for understanding formal logic. Church was one of the principal founders of the Association for Symbolic Logic; he founded the Journal of Symbolic Logic in 1936 and remained an editor until 1979 At his death in 1995, Church was still regarded as the greatest mathematical logician in the world.