INTRODUCTION

Alonzo Church: Life and Work

Life is not the same as work, but in the case of Alonzo Church the con-
nection is tight. His name is preserved in “Church’s Thesis,” referring to the
identification of effective calculability with a precisely defined notion, and in
“Church’s Theorem,” referring to the undecidability of the the concepts of va-
lidity and of satisfiability in first-order logic. And ω1CK is an ordinal number
(the Church–Kleene ordinal) associated with his name.
Church’s work in symbolic logic spans a wide range, both in time and in
subject matter. His first published paper, Uniqueness of the Lorentz Transfor-
mation, appeared in 1924. The following year On Irredundant Sets of Postulates
appeared. Seven decades later, his paper A Theory of the Meaning of Names
was published in 1995. This amazing span of seventy-two years embraces a
remarkable collection of publications.
The nature of Church’s contributions to logic will be discussed below, ar-
ranged under the three headings (i) calculability, (ii) set theory and founda-
tions, and (iii) intensional logic and philosophy. The subjects Church chose to
work on were not selected at random. (Indeed, one suspects that very few of
Church’s decisions involved any elements of randomness.) He was guided by a
sense of what the field needed. Being a person with great determination—even
ambition—he then resolved to get at the heart of the important problems. For
example, his extensive work (especially from 1950 on) in intensional logic seems
to have stemmed from a feeling that following symbolic logic’s success in expli-
cating extensional logic, the field of philosophy stood in need of an analogous
analysis of intensional logic. As he wrote in 1951, “intensional logic also must
ultimately receive treatment by the logistic method.”
Church’s commitment to the needs of the young field of symbolic logic is
also evident in his deep involvement with The Journal of Symbolic Logic.
Church was influential in the founding in 1935 of the Association for Symbolic
Logic, the publisher of JSL. From the first volume (1936), he was an editor and
also edited the Reviews Section of JSL.
The field needed a precise and and sufficiently comprehensive textbook for
undergraduate students. By 1936, mimeographed notes, Mathematical Logic,
had been prepared by Church and his students. In 1944, Introduction to
Mathematical Logic, Part I, was published in the Annals of Mathematical
Studies series, based in part on notes by C. A. Truesdell on Church’s 1943 lec-
tures. Finally in 1956, the greatly revised and enlarged textbook, Introduction
to Mathematical Logic, Volume I, was published by Princeton University
Press. This was the book that defined the subject for a generation of logicians.
It remains in print after more than fifty years, and has set a high standard of
rigor and precision.
Page x of this book give a “tentative table of contents for volume two,”
listing Chapter VI–XII (to follow the Chapters I–V in Volume I). While Volume
II was never published, material for Chapter VII (Second Order Arithmetic)

1
was mimeographed for class use, and is printed in these Collected Works (see
The Logistic System A2 ). Material for Chapter VIII (Gödel’s Incompleteness
Theorems) is also included in these Collected Works, based in part on notes
written by Church and in part on student notes.
The topics for some of the other chapters were addressed in subsequent re-
search papers. In connection with Chapter VI (Functional Calculi of Higher
Order) see Church’s 1972 paper, Axioms for Functional Calculi of Higher Or-
der.) In connection with Chapter IX (Recursive Arithmetic) see his 1957 paper,
Binary Recursive Arithmetic (and his 1965 paper, An Independence Question
in Recursive Arithmetic).
Chapter X was to be An Alternative Formulation of the Simple Theory of
Types. See his 1974 paper, Russellian Simple Type Theory. Chapter XI was to
be Axiomatic Set Theory. While it is uncertain what was to be included is this
chapter, certainly the topic was represented in such papers as his 1974 article
Set Theory with a Universal Set. Finally, Chapter XII was to be Mathematical
Intuitionism. Here it is even less certain what was to be included.
Church’s influence on the field of symbolic field remains strong today. Thirty-
one students received doctorates under his supervision, from 1931 to 1985. In
addition, he taught many more students, either in person or through his text-
book. And his papers continue to form the basis for further research. The pur-
pose of these Collected Works is to facilitate the continued study of Church’s
writings.

Life. Alonzo Church was born on June 14 (Flag Day), 1903, in Washing-
ton, D.C. His great-grandfather (also named Alonzo Church) had moved from
Vermont to Georgia, where he was a professor of mathematics and astronomy—
and then president—of Franklin College, which later became the University of
Georgia. His grandfather Alonzo Webster Church was at one time Librarian
of the U.S. Senate. His father, Samuel Robbins Church, was a Justice of the
Municipal Court of the District of Columbia, until failing vision and hearing
compelled him to give up that post. The family then moved to rural Virginia,
where Alonzo Church and his younger brother grew up.
Alonzo Church had an uncle (also named Alonzo Church) living in Newark,
New Jersey, who was financially helpful to the family, taking an interest in the
children’s education. An airgun incident in high school left Church blind in one
eye. He attended the Ridgefield School, a preparatory school in Connecticut,
graduating in 1920.
After graduating from Ridgefield School, Church enrolled at Princeton, where
his uncles had attended college. For a while he worked part-time in the dining
hall to help pay his way. He was an exceptional student; his first published
paper, Uniqueness of the Lorentz Transformation, was written while he was an
undergraduate. Its object was to obtain a set of logically independent postu-
lates that uniquely determine the Lorentz transformation in one dimension. He
graduated with an A.B. in mathematics, 1924. He then continued graduate
work at Princeton, completing a Ph.D. in three years (in 1927) under Oswald
Veblen. The title of his dissertation was Alternatives to Zermelo’s Assumption.

2
 While a graduate student, he married (1925) Mary Julia Kuczinski, who
was training to be a nurse. (This in spite of the fact that his senior class
had voted him the “most likely to remain a bachelor”—his handsome features
notwithstanding. In the summer of 1924, Church stepped off the curb and was
hit by a trolley car coming from his blind side; Mary was a nurse-trainee at
the hospital.) They were inseparable for the next 51 years, until Mary’s death
in 1976. Mary was an excellent cook; over the years many a mathematician
enjoyed dining at the Church home.
On receiving his degree, he was awarded a two-year National Research Fel-
lowship. So after serving briefly as an Instructor at the University of Chicago
in the summer of 1927, he spent two years visiting first Harvard (1927–28) and
then Göttingen and Amsterdam (1928–29). In particular, he met with Bernays
and with Heyting on this trip.
At the end of his term as a National Research Fellow, Church was invited to
return to the Princeton Mathematics Department, to begin his academic career
there. He was an Assistant Professor 1929–39, an Associate Professor 1939–47,
and a Professor 1947–67 (of Mathematics and Philosophy, 1961–67).
Meanwhile, he and Mary had three children. Alonzo Church, Jr., was born
in 1929 (in Amsterdam), Mary Ann in 1933, and Mildred in 1938. (Mary Ann
later married the logician John Addison.) While Church was developing what
came to be known as Church’s Thesis, for example, there were two small children
in the house. Somehow he balanced Sunday afternoon family outings with the
demands of his work.
Early in his career, Church put together A Bibliography of Symbolic Logic—
nothing less than a complete annotated bibliography of every publication in
symbolic logic up to that time. Thus it would be an understatement to say that
he had a complete familiarity with the literature: he had read, organized, and
indexed (by authors and subject) that literature. Of course, the literature was in
many languages. Church not only had a wide knowledge of modern languages;
he also had studied Latin and Greek.
Princeton in the 1930’s was an exciting place for logic. There was Church
together with his students Stephen Kleene and Barkley Rosser. John von Neu-
mann was there. Alan Turing, who had been thinking about the concept of
effective calculability, came as a visiting graduate student in 1936. He ended
up writing his dissertation under Church. Kurt Gödel visited the Institute for
Advanced Study in 1933–34 (when he lectured on his then-recent incomplete-
ness theorem) and 1935, before moving there permanently. Since Church had
recently been to Göttingen and Amsterdam, he knew personally almost every
logician.
As mentioned above, Church was one of the principal founders of the As-
sociation for Symbolic Logic, in 1935. He made certain that The Journal of
Symbolic Logic got off to a good start; he was an editor for contributed papers
for its first 15 volumes (1936–50). (The other editor of the early volumes was
C. H. Langford.) More importantly, for most of his career, Church was its editor
for reviews, a task he performed for for its first 44 volumes (1936–79).
Church had two goals for the Reviews Section. First, it continued his A

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Bibliography of Symbolic Logic (which was published in the first volume of JSL)
in providing a complete and accurate bibliographical record of publications in
symbolic logic. And secondly, it provided critical analytical commentary on
these publications. In a 1950 letter to Rudolf Carnap, Church explained the
importance he attached to this commentary: “The situation in mathematical
logic has always been much worse than in other branches of mathematics, in
the matter of the frequency of publication of matter containing errors and even
absurdities, with the effect that there is serious danger of the field itself falling
into disrepute. . . . I believe that the Journal has made already considerable
progress, not only in reducing somewhat the proportion of erroneous or pur-
poseless publications, but more important, in making it possible for the general
body of mathematicians and philosophers to have at least some approximate
idea as to how the publications in the field are to be sorted out and which ones
are worth giving attention to.” The reviews were needed to defend the field and
to separate wheat from chaff.
And a motivation for Church’s 1967 departure from Princeton after so many
years was that after his retirement (which would have been mandatory in 1971 at
age 68), Princeton would be unwilling to accommodate the small staff working
on the JSL reviews, while UCLA promised to support the reviews office as long
as Church was its editor.1
Thus Church left Princeton in 1967, and moved to UCLA, where he was
Flint Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics, 1967–90.
Finally in 1979, Church retired from editing JSL reviews, after 44 years. He
retired from teaching at UCLA in 1990, at age 87, ending a teaching career that
had started 63 years before. But his research continued until he died in 1995,
at the age of 92.
Throughout his career, Church supervised research of graduate students.
Altogether, he had 31 doctoral students. The first 28 were at Princeton, 1931–
67; the last three were at UCLA, 1976–85. They form a distinguished list (see
Doctoral Dissertation Students of Alonzo Church in these Collected Works).
Alonzo Church had the polite manners of a gentleman who had grown up in
Virginia. He was never known to be rude, even with people with whom he had
strong disagreements. A deeply religious person, he was a lifelong member of
the Presbyterian church.
In his habits he was careful and deliberate—very careful and very deliber-
ate. The students in his classes would discover this on the first day, when they
saw how he would erase a blackboard. The material he wrote out on paper (he
did not type) was often done in several colors of ink—sometimes colors made
by mixing bottles together—and always done in his distinctive unslanted hand-
writing. He was a master at using white-out fluid to eliminate imperfections.
Finally, an important piece of writing could be made permanent by coating it
with a thin layer of Duco cement. (Duco was the one brand of household cement
that did not shrink the paper.)
1 See H. B. Enderton, Alonzo Church and the Reviews, The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic,

vol. 4 (1998), pp. 172–180.

4
 Church enjoyed reading science fiction magazines. He did not like to see
writers get their facts wrong; he was known to have written several letters to
the editors.
He preferred a nocturnal schedule, working late at night, when it was quiet
and he would not be disturbed. His staff at the JSL reviews office would leave
material on his desk in the afternoon. On arrival in the morning, the they would
find the replies from Church.
He never drove a car. But he would walk substantial distances, in varying
weather and at all hours. Many a student crossing the campus at night would
see a well-dressed portly gentleman with white hair, carrying a briefcase and
humming softly to himself.
While living in Princeton in the 1960’s, Church and his family liked to visit
the Bahamas. Eventually Church bought property there and built two duplexes.
Even after moving to Los Angeles, Church would spend summers at his place
in the Bahamas. He did not spend his time lying on the beach, but it was both
a place to escape to, and a place where the children and grandchildren could
gather.
Although Church had solitary work habits, that is not to say that he lived in
isolation from his colleagues. He attended and spoke at professional meetings.
As time allowed, he answered his mail. He maintained an active correspondence
both with those whose viewpoints were close to his (e.g. Kleene and Rosser) and
with those whose viewpoints were not (e.g. Carnap and Quine).2
Church belonged to a large number of professional organizations, including
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the American
Philosophical Association, the Association for Symbolic Logic, Circolo Matem-
atico di Palermo, and Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences.
In 1966 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
And in 1978 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He received
honorary D.Sc. degrees from Case Western Reserve (1969), Princeton (1985),
and SUNY at Buffalo (1990).
Church died in Hudson, Ohio (where his son lived), on August 11, 1995. He
was buried in the Princeton Cemetery, where his wife and his parents had been
buried. The papers he left behind were donated to the Princeton University
Library.

Work in calculability. Church focused on the concept of effective calcu-

History and Philosophy of Logic, vol. 18 (1997), pp. 211–232.

5
that, given an alleged proof, will verify its syntactic correctness. But exactly
what is an effective procedure?
In 1936 a pair of papers by Church changed the course of logic. An Unsolv-
able Problem of Elementary Number Theory presents a definition and a theorem:
“The purpose of the present paper is to propose a definition of effective calcu-
lability which is thought to correspond satisfactorily to the somewhat vague
intuitive notion . . . , and to show, by means of an example, that not every prob-
lem of this class is solvable.” The “definition” now goes by the name Church’s
Thesis: “We now define the notion . . . of an effectively calculable function of
positive integers by identifying it with the notion of a recursive function of pos-
itive integers (or of a λ-definable function of positive integers).” (The name,
“Church’s Thesis,” was introduced by Kleene.)
The theorem in the paper is that there is a set that can be defined in the
language of elementary number theory (viz. the set of Gödel numbers of for-
mulas of the λ-calculus having a normal form) that is not recursive—although
it is recursively enumerable. Thus truth in elementary number theory is an
effectively unsolvable problem.
A sentence at the end of the paper adds the consequence that if the system
of Principia Mathematica is ω-consistent, then its decision problem is un-
solvable. It also follows that the system (if ω-consistent) is incomplete, but of
course Gödel had shown that in 1931.
As indicated above, the paper identifies the effective calculability of a func-
tion with two equivalent precisely defined concepts: One is recursiveness, which
here means that a set of recursion equations exists from which can be derived
exactly the correct values of the function (a concept Gödel formulated in his
1934 lectures at Princeton, crediting in part a suggestion by Jacques Herbrand).
The other is λ-definability, meaning that for a suitable formula of the λ-calculus,
exactly the correct values of the function are derivable. (In a footnote, Church
writes, “The question of the relationship between effective calculability and
recursiveness . . . was raised by Gödel in conversation with the author. The
corresponding question of the relationship between effective calculability and
λ-definability had previously been proposed by the author independently.”)3
Church had been working on the λ-calculus in connection with his two-part
A Set of Postulates for the Foundations of Logic (1932 and 1933), where the
intent was to develop axioms that “would lead to a system of mathematical
logic free of some of the complications entailed by Bertrand Russell’s theory of
types, and would at the same time avoid the well known paradoxes, in particular
the Russell paradox.” As it turned out, the future of the λ-calculus lay not in
that direction (it turned out that contradictions had not been avoided), but
in computer science. Church’s 1941 monograph The Calculi of Lambda-
conversion was later useful to others in the development of semantics for
programming languages.4 Today the λ-calculus is a major research topic in
3 See Wilfried Sieg, Step by Recursive Step: Church’s Analysis of Effective Calculability,

The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 3 (1997), pp. 154–180.

The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 3 (1997), pp. 181–215.

6
theoretical computer science.
One person who read Church’s paper with great interest—not to say dismay—
was Alan Turing. Turing at that time was a student at Cambridge, working with
Max Newman. Turing had independently formulated an exact mathematical
concept to make rigorous the informal concept of effective calculability. Tur-
ing’s concept was equivalent to Church’s, as Turing showed in an appendix to his
paper. But it was formulated in very different terms, involving a step-by-step
simulation—by an imaginary machine—of a calculational procedure a person
might carry out. (The phrase “Turing machine” first appeared in Church’s re-
view of Turing’s paper in The Journal of Symbolic Logic.) Thus Turing’s
definition stood in contrast to the formulations in terms of formal logical calculi.
Turing wrote to Church, and he came to Princeton as a visiting graduate
student. At the encouragement of John von Neumann, Turing stayed a second
year, eventually completing his Ph.D. degree under Church. Turing’s disserta-
tion involved transfinite extensions of logical systems, a topic taken up much
later by Solomon Feferman.
It is an interesting fact that the idea of formalizing the concept of effective
calculability occurred at roughly the same time to several people: Gödel (who
mentions the problem in his 1934 Princeton lectures), Church, Turing, and
Emil Post (who independently developed a formulation somewhat along the
lines Turing used).
The name for the class of effectively computable function (as defined by any
one of these equivalent definitions) came to be “recursive functions.” The name
made sense from the viewpoint of the Gödel–Herbrand formulation. (Gödel had
used the term “rekursiv” in his 1931 paper for what are now called the primitive
recursive functions. Kleene applied the name “general recursive functions” to
the functions obtained from the primitive recursive functions by the least-zero
search operator.) But the other equivalent formulations did not involve recur-
sion in an essential way. So the name of the class of functions (and of the
subject of “recursive function theory” or “recursion theory”) was something of
a misnomer. The adjective Church used was “calculable”; the adjective Turing
used was “computable.” Recently there has been a movement to change the
name of the subject to “computability theory.”
Another 1936 paper that changed the course of logic was A Note on the
Entschiedungsproblem. This short paper (two pages, followed by a two-page
correction) presents what is now called Church’s theorem: The problem of de-
ciding validity of formulas in first-order logic is unsolvable. The method of proof
is first to make a finitely axiomatizable theory (in a expanded language) in which
a certain function enumerating a recursively enumerable, but non-recursive, set
can be represented. And then one can eliminate the added function symbols.
Moreover, Church published two other papers in 1936, together with his
former students. Some Properties of Conversion, with Barkley Rosser, dealt
with the λ-calculus. Formal Definitions in the Theory of Ordinal Number, with
Stephen Kleene, was followed by Church’s 1938 paper, The Constructive Second
Number Class. It is here that the least non-constructive ordinal, now called ω1CK ,
arises.

7
 Work in set theory and foundations. Church’s dissertation, Alterna-
tives to Zermelo’s Assumption (published in 1927) already displayed a broad-
minded (and even skeptical) attitude toward set theory. “Zermelo’s assumption”
is of course the axiom of choice, and Church’s attitude was not to regard the
axiom of choice as received doctrine, but instead was to examine what array of
other set theories might serve instead for the foundations of mathematics.
A similar spirit can be seen in his much later paper Set Theory with a
Universal Set (presented at a symposium honoring Alfred Tarski in 1971 and
published in 1974). In this instance it was the so-called principle of limitation
of size that was the issue. This paper presents a system of set theory in which
every set has a complement, and proves its consistency relative to ZF. As the
paper says, “there is room for exploration of the axiomatic possibilities.” And
it concludes with the intriguing statement: “Indeed an interesting possibility
which must not at this stage be excluded is a synthesis or partial synthesis of
ZF set theory and Quine set theory.”
It is not surprising that Church found Quine’s system New Foundations (NF)
interesting. While many mathematicians—through fondness for the principle of
limitation of size or for universal choice—found NF unappealing, Church was
more than willing to take it seriously. The key idea of avoiding the paradoxes by
restricting comprehension to stratified formulas fit well into the Frege–Russell
tradition. What was lacking was a relative consistency proof.
Church devoted a substantial effort, especially in the 1970’s, toward sup-
plying a consistency result for NF. As he said, his “purpose is not specially to
advocate the Quine set theory but to explore the possibilities in regard to non-
Neumannian set theories.” In the end, the effort was unsuccessful. He left in
his Nachlass several three-ring binders presenting his work—describing what he
had tried, what worked, what did not work. The work was left in well-organized
form, written out in several colors of ink. These notebooks, with his other pa-
pers, went to the Princeton University Library. Future graduate students may
yet mine this material for dissertations.
In connection with set theory, it might also be mentioned that in his 1953
paper, Non-normal Truth-tables for the Propositional Calculus, where Church
considers replacing the set {0, 1} of two truth values by larger Boolean algebras,
he wrote: “Another motive is the suggestion, which was made to me by Paco
Lagerström ten years or more ago, that use may be made [of the method] in
order to extend to the functional calculi of first and higher order, and other
related systems, the method of proving independence of axioms.” A decade
later, Boolean-valued models of set theory were used to present Paul Cohen’s
results on the relative independence of the axiom of choice in Zermelo–Fraenkel
set theory.

—H.B.E.

Work in intensional logic and philosophy.