Dr Máté Szabó
My research is in the fields of history and philosophy of logic and computing. I am interested in the concept of computing from both philosophical and historical perspectives, and the interactions between logic and computing. Currently I am examining the early work of Max Newman and his impact on Alan Turing’s seminal paper on computability from 1936, as well as the history of elementary functions and its philosophical relevance for computability in practice. I am also interested in the history of the computerization of the Eastern Bloc, especially Ryad, the Comecon countries’ joint effort to reverse engineer the IBM 360 mainframe family during the 1970s.
Kalmár's Argument Against the Plausibility of Church's Thesis
In his famous paper, An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory , Alonzo Church (1936) identified the intuitive notion of effective calculability with the mathematically precise notion of recursiveness. This proposal, known as Church's Thesis, has been widely accepted. Only a few papers have been written against it. One of these is László Kalmár's An Argument Against the Plausibility of Church's Thesis from 1959. The aim of this paper is to present Kalmár's argument and to fill in missing details based on his general philosophical thoughts on mathematics.
History and Philosophy of Logic, 2018, Vol. 39, No. 2, 140-157.
