Alonzo Church

Alonzo Church was a prominent mathematician and logician who significantly advanced our understanding of computability and formal logic. He is best known for developing the Church-Turing thesis, which proposes that any function computable by a mechanical process can be computed by a Turing machine. This work laid the foundation for modern computer science and theories of computation. Additionally, Church's lambda calculus is a formal system used to express computation and functions. His contributions have influenced various fields, including philosophical logic and the study of the limits of what can be computed or proved mathematically.