Stephen Cole Kleene was one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century and this book is the influential textbook he wrote to teach the subject to the next generation. It was first published in 1952, some twenty years after the publication of Godel's paper on the incompleteness of arithmetic, which marked, if not the beginning of modern logic. The 1930s was a time of creativity and ferment in the subject, when the notion of computable moved from the realm of (...) philosophical speculation to the realm of science. This was accomplished by the work of Kurt Gode1, Alan Turing, and Alonzo Church, who gave three apparently different precise definitions of computable. When they all turned out to be equivalent, there was a collective realization that this was indeed the right notion. Kleene played a key role in this process. One could say that he was there at the beginning of modern logic. He showed the equivalence of lambda calculus with Turing machines and with Godel's recursion equations, and developed the modern machinery of partial recursive functions. This textbook played an invaluable part in educating the logicians of the present. It played an important role in their own logical education.". (shrink)

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This book is a relatively self-contained introduction to the subject, which includes the necessary background material, as well as numerous examples and exercises.

A young scientist and mathematician explores the mystery and complexity of human thought processes from an interdisciplinary point of view.

Gathered together here are the fundamental texts of the great classical period in modern logic. A complete translation of Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift--which opened a great epoch in the history of logic by fully presenting propositional calculus and quantification theory--begins the volume, which concludes with papers by Herbrand and by Gödel.