Traces the development of recursive functions from their origins in the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s, with particular emphasis on the work and influence of Kurt Gödel.

Recursive Functions and Metamathematics deals with problems of the completeness and decidability of theories, using as its main tool the theory of recursive functions. This theory is first introduced and discussed. Then Gödel's incompleteness theorems are presented, together with generalizations, strengthenings, and the decidability theory. The book also considers the historical and philosophical context of these issues and their philosophical and methodological consequences. Recent results and trends have been included, such as undecidable sentences of mathematical content, reverse mathematics. All the main results are presented in detail. The book is self-contained and presupposes only some knowledge of elementary mathematical logic. There is an extensive bibliography. Readership: Scholars and advanced students of logic, mathematics, philosophy of science.

..."The book, written by one of the main researchers on the field, gives a complete account of the theory of r.e. degrees. .... The definitions, results and proofs are always clearly motivated and explained before the formal presentation; the proofs are described with remarkable clarity and conciseness. The book is highly recommended to everyone interested in logic. It also provides a useful background to computer scientists, in particular to theoretical computer scientists." Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum, Ungarn 1988 ..."The main purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the main results and to the intricacies of the current theory for the recurseively enumerable sets and degrees. The author has managed to give a coherent exposition of a rather complex and messy area of logic, and with this book degree-theory is far more accessible to students and logicians in other fields than it used to be." Zentralblatt für Mathematik, 623.1988

Computer scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers discuss the conceptual foundations of the notion of computability as well as recent theoretical developments. In the 1930s a series of seminal works published by Alan Turing, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and others established the theoretical basis for computability. This work, advancing precise characterizations of effective, algorithmic computability, was the culmination of intensive investigations into the foundations of mathematics. In the decades since, the theory of computability has moved to the center of discussions in philosophy, computer science, and cognitive science. In this volume, distinguished computer scientists, mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers consider the conceptual foundations of computability in light of our modern understanding.Some chapters focus on the pioneering work by Turing, Gödel, and Church, including the Church-Turing thesis and Gödel's response to Church's and Turing's proposals. Other chapters cover more recent technical developments, including computability over the reals, Gödel's influence on mathematical logic and on recursion theory and the impact of work by Turing and Emil Post on our theoretical understanding of online and interactive computing; and others relate computability and complexity to issues in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mathematics.ContributorsScott Aaronson, Dorit Aharonov, B. Jack Copeland, Martin Davis, Solomon Feferman, Saul Kripke, Carl J. Posy, Hilary Putnam, Oron Shagrir, Stewart Shapiro, Wilfried Sieg, Robert I. Soare, Umesh V. Vazirani

This fifth edition of 'Computability and Logic' covers not just the staple topics of an intermediate logic course such as Godel's incompleteness theorems, but also optional topics that include Turing's theory of computability and Ramsey's theorem.

What can we compute--even with unlimited resources? Is everything within reach? Or are computations necessarily drastically limited, not just in practice, but theoretically? These questions are at the heart of computability theory. The goal of this book is to give the reader a firm grounding in the fundamentals of computability theory and an overview of currently active areas of research, such as reverse mathematics and algorithmic randomness. Turing machines and partial recursive functions are explored in detail, and vital tools and concepts including coding, uniformity, and diagonalization are described explicitly. From there the material continues with universal machines, the halting problem, parametrization and the recursion theorem, and thence to computability for sets, enumerability, and Turing reduction and degrees. A few more advanced topics round out the book before the chapter on areas of research. The text is designed to be self-contained, with an entire chapter of preliminary material including relations, recursion, induction, and logical and set notation and operators. That background, along with ample explanation, examples, exercises, and suggestions for further reading, make this book ideal for independent study or courses with few prerequisites.

Turing's famous 1936 paper introduced a formal definition of a computing machine, a Turing machine. This model led to both the development of actual computers and to computability theory, the study of what machines can and cannot compute. This book presents classical computability theory from Turing and Post to current results and methods, and their use in studying the information content of algebraic structures, models, and their relation to Peano arithmetic. The author presents the subject as an art to be practiced, and an art in the aesthetic sense of inherent beauty which all mathematicians recognize in their subject. Part I gives a thorough development of the foundations of computability, from the definition of Turing machines up to finite injury priority arguments. Key topics include relative computability, and computably enumerable sets, those which can be effectively listed but not necessarily effectively decided, such as the theorems of Peano arithmetic. Part II includes the study of computably open and closed sets of reals and basis and nonbasis theorems for effectively closed sets. Part III covers minimal Turing degrees. Part IV is an introduction to games and their use in proving theorems. Finally, Part V offers a short history of computability theory. The author has honed the content over decades according to feedback from students, lecturers, and researchers around the world. Most chapters include exercises, and the material is carefully structured according to importance and difficulty. The book is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and mathematics and researchers engaged with computability and mathematical logic.

What can computers do in principle? What are their inherent theoretical limitations? The theoretical framework which enables such questions to be answered has been developed over the last fifty years from the idea of a computable function - a function whose values can be calculated in an automatic way.