Computability and analysis: the legacy of Alan Turing

Abstract

For most of its history, mathematics was algorithmic in nature. The geometric claims in Euclid’s Elements fall into two distinct categories: “problems,” which assert that a construction can be carried out to meet a given specification, and “theorems,” which assert that some property holds of a particular geometric configuration. For example, Proposition 10 of Book I reads “To bisect a given straight line.” Euclid’s “proof” gives the construction, and ends with the (Greek equivalent of) quod erat faciendum, or Q.E.F., “that which was to be done.” Proofs of theorems, in contrast, end with quod erat demonstrandum, or “that which was to be shown”; but even these typically involve the construction of auxiliary geometric objects in order to verify the claim. Similarly, algebra was devoted to discovering algorithms for solving equations. This outlook characterized the subject from its origins in ancient Egypt and Babylon, through the ninth century work of al-Khwarizmi, to the solutions to the cubic and quadratic equations in Cardano’s Ars magna of 1545, and to Lagrange’s study of the quintic in his Reflexions sur la resolution algebrique des equations of 1770. The theory of probability, which was born in an exchange of letters between Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat in 1654 and developed further by Christian Huygens and Jakob Bernoulli, provided methods for calculating odds related to games of chance. Abraham de Moivre’s 1718 monograph on the subject was