Alan Turing’s Systems of Logic: The Princeton Thesis

(Princeton University Press) Alan Turing (1912-1954) broke the German Enigma code during World War II, and was the British founder of computer science and artificial intelligence. Though less well known than his other work, Turing’s 1938 Princeton Ph.D. thesis, “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,” which includes his notion of an oracle machine, has had a lasting influence on computer science and mathematics. This book presents a facsimile of the original typescript of the thesis along with essays by Andrew Appel and Solomon Feferman that explain its still-unfolding significance. Appel is Eugene Higgins Professor and Chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton.