Turing’s Thesis Stanford University（图灵的论文斯坦福大学）.pdf

Turing’s Thesis Solomon Feferman In the sole extended break from his life and varied career in England, Alan Turing spent the years 1936-1938 doing graduate work at Princeton University under the direction of Alonzo Church, the doyen of American logicians. Those two years sufficed for him to complete a thesis and obtain the PhD. The results of the thesis were published in 1939 under the title “Systems of logic based on ordinals” [23]. That was the first systematic attempt to deal with the natural idea of overcoming the Gödelian incompleteness of formal systems by iterating the adjunction of statements--such as the consistency of the system--that “ought to” have been accepted but were not derivable; in fact these kinds of iterations can be extended into the transfinite. As Turing put it beautifully in his introduction to [23]: The well-known theorem of Gödel (1931) shows that every system of logic is in a certain sense incomplete, but at the same time it indicates means whereby from a system L of logic a more complete system L ′ may be obtained. By repeating the process we get a sequence L , L = L ′, L = L ′, … each more complete than the 1 2 1 preceding. A logic Lω may then be constructed in which the provable theorems are the totality of theorems provable with the help of the logics L , L , L , … 1 2 Proceeding in this way we can associate a system of logic with any constructive ordinal. It may be asked whether such a sequence of logics of this kind is complete in the sense that to any problem