An Early History of Recursive Functions and Computability from Godel to Turing - Softcover

Adams, Rod

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0983700400 ISBN 13: 9780983700401

Publisher: Docent Press, 2011

Synopsis

An Early History of Recursive Functions and Computability traces the development of recursive functions from their origins in the late nineteenth century, when recursion was first used as a method of defining simple arithmetic functions, up to the mid-1930's, when the class of general recursive functions was introduced by Godel, formalized by Kleene and used by Church in his thesis. The book explains how the proposal given in Church's 1936 paper, now known as Church's thesis, first arose and concludes with the consideration of another class of functions, the Turing computable functions, that were specially created to be equivalent to the class of effectively calculable functions. The book includes previously unpublished letters between the author and many of the key historical figures.

About this title

About the Author:

Rod Adams received his PhD from the School of Information Sciences at The Hatfield Polytechnique under the supervision of Dr. Dale Johnson. Dr. Adams is currently a Professor of Neural Computation at the University of Hertfordshire.

About this edition

• Publisher: Docent Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0983700400
• ISBN 13: 9780983700401
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 310
• Illustrator: Riddell Brenda