Introduction to Metamathematics (Bibliotheca Mathematica)

Kleene, S.C.

ISBN 10: 0720421039 / ISBN 13: 9780720421033

Published by North Holland, 2005

About this Item

Near Fine condition hardcover book, no dust jacket as issued. Transfered to digital printing 2005. Very slight shelf wear to covers and spines. Few shallow indentations to spine, mostly near top edge. Very slight bumping to spine edges and cover corners. Minute smudging to top edge of text block. All books are individually inspected and described. Never X-Library unless specifically described as such.

Seller Inventory # 2501-9514

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Introduction to Metamathematics (Bibliotheca Mathematica)
• Publisher: North Holland
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0720421039
• ISBN 13: 9780720421033
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

About this title

Synopsis

Stephen Cole Kleene was one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century and this book is the influential textbook he wrote to teach the subject to the next generation. It was first published in 1952, some twenty years after the publication of Gadel's paper on the incompleteness of arithmetic, which marked, if not the beginning of modern logic, at least a turning point after which nothing was ever the same. Kleene was an important figure in logic, and lived a long full life of scholarship and teaching. The 1930s was a time of creativity and ferment in the subject, when the notion of computable moved from the realm of philosophical speculation to the realm of science. This was accomplished by the work of Kurt Gade1, Alan Turing, and Alonzo Church, who gave three apparently different precise definitions of computable. When they all turned out to be equivalent, there was a collective realization that this was indeed the right notion. Kleene played a key role in this process. One could say that he was there at the beginning of modern logic. He showed the equivalence of lambda calculus with Turing machines and with Gadel's recursion equations, and developed the modern machinery of partial recursive functions. This textbook played an invaluable part in educating the logicians of the present. It played an important role in their own logical education.