Alonzo Church
June 14, 1903 - August 11, 1995
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Scientific Discipline: Mathematics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1978)
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Alonzo Church was a mathematical logician whose contributions helped to establish the foundations of theoretical computer science. His most renowned accomplishments were Church’s theorem, the Church-Turing thesis, and the creation of λ-calculus, or the Church λ operator. In his 1936 paper, Church’s theorem proved that the Entscheidungsproblem (“decision problem”) was unsolvable for the theory of Peano arithmetic, which was a major breakthrough for early computer science. This work led to the Church-Turning thesis which stated a general solution for the “decision problem” was unattainable assuming that the functions computable by a Turing machine or by λ-calculus were effectively calculable. Church’s founding of λ-calculus, a systematic formulation of mathematical foundations, contributed to the theory of finite automata and semantics and advanced the modern understanding of mathematical logic.
Church attended Princeton University to earn his A.B. degree in 1924 and his Ph.D. in mathematics three years later. He stayed at the university as a professor of both mathematics and philosophy until 1967 when he left to become a professor in residence at the University of California in Los Angeles. In 1936, Church founded the Journal for Symbolic Logic, and was the editor for over forty years. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Academie International de Philosophie des Sciences.
