San Antonio College Library

"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...

In this book the author re-creates the scenes of focused experimentation, incredible mathematical insight, and pure creative genius that gave us computers, digital television, modern genetics, models of stellar evolution, in other words, computer code. In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses, led by John von Neumann, gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization...