IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-319-22156-4_12.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Why Turing’s Thesis Is Not a Thesis

In: Turing’s Revolution

Author

Listed:
  • Robert Irving Soare

    (The University of Chicago, Department of Mathematics)

Abstract

In 1936 Alan Turing showed that any effectively calculable function is computable by a Turing machine. Scholars at the time, such as Kurt Gödel and Alonzo Church, regarded this as a convincing demonstration of this claim, not as a mere hypothesis in need of continual reexamination and justification. In 1988 Robin Gandy said that Turing’s analysis “proves a theorem.” However, Stephen C. Kleene introduced the term “thesis” in 1943 and in his book in 1952. Since then it has been known as “Turing’s Thesis.” Here we discuss whether it is a thesis, a definition, or a theorem. This is important to determine what Turing actually accomplished.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert Irving Soare, 2015. "Why Turing’s Thesis Is Not a Thesis," Springer Books, in: Giovanni Sommaruga & Thomas Strahm (ed.), Turing’s Revolution, pages 297-310, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-22156-4_12
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-22156-4_12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-22156-4_12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.