Turing's proof

Common card · No. 383635

Turing's proof is a proof by Alan Turing submitted on 12 November 1936 and first published in 1937 with the title "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". It was the second proof (after Church's theorem) of the negation of Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem; that is, the conjecture that some purely mathematical yes–no questions can never be answered by computation; more technically, that some decision problems are "undecidable" in the sense that there is no single algorithm that infallibly gives a correct "yes" or "no" answer to each instance of the problem. In Turing's own words: "what I shall prove is quite different from the well-known results of Gödel ... I shall now show that there is no general method which tells whether a given formula U is provable in K [Principia Mathematica]". Turing followed this proof with two others. The second and third both rely on the first. All rely on his development of typewriter-like "computing machines" that obey a simple...

Read on Wikipedia