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(C0948) 1924-1995 |
Alonzo Church, 1903-1995 |
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Finding Aid Prepared by Sylvia Yu and Laura Hildago, Princeton Class of 2006 Manuscripts Division
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Introduction
The Alonzo Church Papers consists of the writings, correspondence, notebooks, notes, and subject files of Alonzo Church (1903-1995, Princeton Class of 1924), the renowned mathematical logician who taught at Princeton University from 1929-1967 and the University of California at Los Angeles from 1967 to 1990, and who was editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic from 1936 to 1979.Range of Collection Dates: 1924-1995
Size: 35.3 linear feet (83 archival boxes, 1 half-size archival box, 1 small archival box)
Language: English
Provenance: The family of Alonzo Church (his son, Alonzo Church, Jr., and his two daughters, Mary Ann Addison and Mildred Dandridge) donated his papers to the Princeton University Library in April 2003.
Restrictions: None
Photocopying, literary rights, and citation: Single photocopies
may be made for research purposes. No further photoduplication of copies
of material in the collection can be made when Princeton University Library
does not own the original. Permission to publish material from the collection
must be requested from the Associate University Librarian for Rare Books
and Special Collections. The library has no information on the status of
literary rights in the collection and researchers are responsible for determining
any questions of copyright. Citations should be as follows: Alonzo Church
Papers, Box #, Folder #, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Princeton University Library.
Biographical Sketch
Alonzo Church was born on June 14, 1903, in Washington, D.C., to Samuel Robbins Church, a justice of the Municipal Court of the District of Columbia, and Mildred Hannah Church (née Parker). His great-grandfather, also named Alonzo Church, was professor of mathematics and, later, president of the college in Athens, Georgia, from 1829 to 1859. Church received his A.B. degree (1924) and Ph.D. degree (1927) from Princeton University under the guidance of Oswald Veblen. Church's doctoral dissertation was published in the January 1927 issue of Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, and titled "Alternatives to Zermelo's Assumption." He went on to study at Harvard University for a year (1927-28) on a National Research Fellowship, followed by a year abroad (1928-29) on an International Research Fellowship at the Universities of Göttingen and Amsterdam (where he visited with L. E. J. Brouwer). Church was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Princeton in 1929, promoted to Associate Professor in 1939, received tenure in 1947; from 1961 to 1967 he was Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy.When the Association for Symbolic Logic was founded in 1935, Church became one of its first officers and the first co-editor (with C. H. Langford) of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. The first issue of the journal was published in March 1936, and Church served as editor of reviews for its first 44 volumes (1936-79). As a result of the high standards he set for the reviews section, Church was instrumental in building respect for the field of symbolic logic among mathematicians and philosophers.
During the 1930s, Church made Princeton a leading center of research in mathematical logic, with a focus on questions of the completeness and decidability of logical systems. In 1936 he demonstrated the undecidability of first-order logic ("Church's Theorem"), thus extending the famous result of Kurt Gödel, who was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study at the time. Together with his early students, J. Barkley Rosser, Steven C. Kleene, and Alan M. Turing, Church established the equivalence of the lambda calculus, recursive function theory, and Turing machines as formalizations of the notion of "effective calculability," a result that has come to be known as the "Church-Turing Thesis." In the 1950s and 1960s another generation of Church's students, including Michael Rabin, Hartley Rodgers, and Dana Scott, extended this research to automata, formal languages, and formal semantics, thus shaping the new field of theoretical computer science. Through this work--the lambda calculus--one of Church's earliest creations, gained new life as the basis for functional programming languages and for denotational semantics.
In 1967, Church moved his Journal of Symbolic Logic office's operations from Princeton to Los Angeles and continued his teaching career as Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at UCLA until his retirement in 1990.
Church's writings range from papers published in numerous academic journals and books, to his 1941 monograph The Calculi of Lambda-Conversion and 1956 textbook An Introduction to Mathematical Logic, and to articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica for which he served as consulting editor on topics of mathematics and philosophy.
Church was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978 and was
also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and British
Academy. He received honorary degrees from Case Western Reserve University
(1969), Princeton University (1985) and the State University of New York
at Buffalo (1990). The following statement was read aloud during the Princeton
ceremony:
Over some 40 years of research and teaching, he made Princeton an international center of symbolic logic. In work contributing to what has been termed 'a fundamental discovery of the mathematicizing power of Homo Sapiens,' he defined the central question concerning the boundaries of formal reasoning. As longstanding editor and reviewer for his discipline's journal, he gave critical guidance to its quest for the foundations of mathematics and chronicled its history. Through his students, he set a path that has led from the abstract realm of mathematical logic to the concrete domains of computer science and to new vistas of mathematical power.
Church was married to Mary Julia Kuczinski from 1925 until her death
in 1976, and they had three children--Alonzo Church, Jr. (Princeton Class
of 1951), Mary Ann Addison, and Mildred Warner Dandridge. Several other
of Church's relatives also attended Princeton University, including Church's
grandson, Alonzo Addison (Class of 1987), and three of Church's uncles.
The uncle who was also named Alonzo Church was a member of the Class of
1892; James Robb Church belonged to the Class of 1888; and W. W. "Will"
Church was in the Class of 1897. Following his retirement from UCLA, Alonzo
Church moved to Hudson, Ohio, where his son resided. Church died on August
11, 1995, and was buried in the family plot in the Princeton Cemetery.
Collection Description
Scope NoteConsists of the writings, correspondence, notes, and subject files of Alonzo Church. (For a more detailed description of these, see the Series Descriptions below.) Correspondents include Paul Bernays, Rudolf Carnap, Frederic B. Fitch, S. C. Kleene, E. L. Post, W. V. Quine, J. Barkley Rosser, Alfred Tarski, and Alan Turing, in addition to the many contributors to the Journal of Symbolic Logic during the years in which Church was editor.
Arrangement
The collection has been arranged in the following series: I. Writings, II. Correspondence, III. Notebooks and Notes, IV. Subject Files, and V. Papers of Others.
Added Entries
The following added entries have been assigned to this collection to highlight significant sources (other than the main entry), subjects, and forms of the collection's materials. Where possible Library of Congress Subjects Headings have been used, and the forms of names reflect international cataloging standards. As a result, all of these entries may be searched in the Library's online catalog, the Department's database (MASC), and other bibliographic catalogs, to find related material.
Subject Headings (in uppercase) / Form Headings (in upper and lower case):
ASSOCIATION FOR SYMBOLIC LOGIC
Church, Alonzo, 1903-1995--Photographs
Introduction to mathematical logic / Alonzo Church
JOURNAL OF SYMBOLIC LOGIC
LAMBDA CALCULUS
LOGIC, SYMBOLIC AND MATHEMATICAL
Logic, Symbolic and mathematical--Periodicals
Mathematicians--United States--20th century--Correspondence
Mathematicians--United States--20th century--Lectures
Mathematicians--United States--20th century--Manuscripts
Mathematicians--United States--20th century--Notebooks
MATHEMATICS--PHILOSOPHY
MATHEMATICS--RESEARCH--CALIFORNIA--LOS ANGELES--20TH
CENTURY
MATHEMATICS--RESEARCH--NEW JERSEY--PRINCETON--20TH
CENTURY
MATHEMATICS--STUDY AND TEACHING--CALIFORNIA--LOS
ANGELES--20TH CENTURY
MATHEMATICS--STUDY AND TEACHING--NEW JERSEY--PRINCETON--20TH
CENTURY
Princeton University--Alumni (Class of 1924)--Correspondence
Princeton University--Faculty--20th century--Correspondence
Princeton University--Faculty--20th century--Manuscripts
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. CLASS OF 1924
RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS
Series Descriptions
| I. Writings | Boxes 1-15 |
| This series consists of Church's published and unpublished papers, lectures, and books, including reprints, manuscript drafts, research notes, and related correspondence. The first half of this series (Boxes 1-8) contains published papers, lectures, and a few reviews, all of which are arranged primarily by publication year, spanning 1924 to 1993. One exception is Church's 1995 published paper, which is placed in 1990, the year it was presented in a conference. In addition, a folder of miscellaneous, loose, and unidentified manuscript pages from Church's writings is at the end of Box 8. The second half of the series (Boxes 9-15) contains material pertaining to collected works of Church projects (unpublished as of this writing), early versions of Church's seminal textbook, Introduction to Mathematical Logic, the first edition of which was published by the Princeton University Press in 1956 (Church's many stenographers' notebooks filled with notes for the book are also included here), as well as some of Church's lectures, abstracts, and unpublished manuscripts. Church's mathematics and philosophy articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, along with his related editorial work and correspondence, are located in the Subject Files series. |
| II. Correspondence | Boxes 16-39 |
| This series consists of Church's extensive correspondence (dating from 1928 to 1995) that relates to all aspects of Church's academic life and career, including his association with the Association of Symbolic Logic (ASL) from its earliest days (1935 and onwards) and the publication of the Journal of Symbolic Logic (JSL), of which he served as editor and editor of reviews from 1936 until 1979. While the academic correspondence is primarily organized alphabetically by correspondents' or organization's names, the JSL and ASL correspondence sub-series reflects changes in office filing systems over the years. Whenever possible, the original filing systems were preserved in the organization of this series. It is therefore possible to find the letters of any one prominent scholar under several categories; for example, W. V. Quine's letters can be found organized by year in the JSL/ASL sub-series between 1936 and 1979, including in one folder labeled "JSL Correspondence 1957-59 L-Z," and by name in both the academic correspondence and the JSL office correspondence files. There is a limited amount of non-academic-related correspondence (family, friends, financial, etc.) at the end of the series. |
| III. Notebooks and Notes | Boxes 40-50, 82-85 |
| This series consists of Church's notes beginning with an undergraduate course at Princeton University in 1924 to his extensive research notes (many of which were removed from their original 3-ring binder notebooks), notes compiled by students from Church's course lectures at Princeton University and UCLA, and miscellaneous, loose notes, both dated and undated, through the years. The organization of this series follows and retains, wherever possible, Church's own subject filing system, including his original folder title and order. *Also includes loose notes removed from Church's books in his personal library. |
| IV. Subject Files | Boxes 51-60 |
| This series consists of Church's academic and administrative files at Princeton University and UCLA, organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences (to which he was elected in 1978) and National Science Foundation, as well as his editorial and subject files pertaining to his consulting work with various encyclopedia and dictionaries, academic and research topics, etc. A small amount of personal, family-related, and financial material is filed at the end of this series. |
| V. Papers of Others | Boxes 61-81 |
| This series consists of reprints of papers filed alphabetically by the author's name. They include doctoral dissertations by Church's students, manuscript drafts, and articles photocopied from journals and books, some of which were compiled by, or sent to, Church for his own research and/or for potential review in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Original cover letters were kept with the papers whenever possible, as well as correspondence and comments by Church. |
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Last Modified: December 18 2006
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