Alonzo Church (mathematician)

Alonzo Church was an influential American mathematician and logician known for his work in foundational computer science and logic. He developed the lambda calculus, a formal system that models functions and computation, which became fundamental to understanding programming languages and the nature of algorithms. Church also contributed to the formulation of the Church-Turing thesis, proposing that a simple abstract machine could perform any computation feasible by an algorithm. His work helped establish the theoretical basis for modern computation, influencing fields like computer science, artificial intelligence, and mathematics.