The Great Formal Machinery Works: Theories of Deduction and Computation at the Origins of the Digital Age
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.60 (627 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0691174172 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 400 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-10-07 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
From the Back Cover"Von Plato's book is a lively and provocative history of mathematical logic, centered on the game-changing discoveries of Gödel, Turing, and Gentzen. Every mathematician interested in foundations will enjoy this book, and will likely lose some misconceptions as well as gain new insights."--John Stillwell, author of Elements of Mathematics: From Euclid to Gödel"Von Plato covers an immense territory with an impressive amount of novel things to say. He has written a v
They were an enormous boost to the study of formal languages and computability, which were brought to perfection by the end of the 1930s with precise theories of formal languages and formal deduction and parallel theories of algorithmic computability. Von Plato shows how the idea of a formal proof in mathematics emerged gradually in the second half of the nineteenth century, hand in hand with the notion of a formal process of computation. Von Plato describes how the first theoretical ideas of a computer soon emerged in the work of Alan Turing in 1936 and John von Neumann some years later.Shedding new light on this crucial chapter in the history of science, The Great F
Jan von Plato is professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His books include Elements of Logical Reasoning and Structural Proof Theory.