Logic, Meaning and Computation: Essays in Memory of Alonzo Church (Synthese Library, 305)

Alonzo Church was undeniably one ofthe intellectual giants of theTwenti­ eth Century . These articles are dedicated to his memory and illustrate the tremendous importance his ideas have had in logic , mathematics, comput er science and philosophy . Discussions of some of thesevarious contributions have appeared in The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, and th e interested reader is invited to seek details there . Here we justtry to give somegener al sense of the scope, depth,and value of his work. Church is perhaps best known for the theorem , appropriately called " C h u r c h ' s Theorem ", that there is no decision procedure forthelogical valid­ ity of formulas first-order of logic . A d ecision proce dure forthat part of logic would have come near to fulfilling Leibniz's dream of a calculus that could be mechanically used tosettle logical disputes . It was not to . be It could not be . What Church proved precisely is that there is no lambda-definable function that can i n every case providethe right answer , ' y e s ' or ' n o', tothe question of whether or not any arbitrarily given formula is valid .