History Corner

Alonzo S. Church

Over the years, members of the Mathematics Department have played important roles in the development of the University, the state of Georgia, and the ever-evolving state of mathematics. Here, in our History Corner, Professor Emeritus Thomas Brahana has contributed a short piece about Professor Alonso S. Church.

Alonzo Church was a professor of mathematics at the Franklin College, which later became the University of Georgia, from 1819 to 1859. During most of that time (1829-1859) he was president of the university.

There are some direct traces of Professor Church in the university annals – a portrait, his handwriting in faculty minutes - but information about the extent of his mathematical knowledge must be inferred. It is unlikely that he knew of the work of Gauss, Galois or Legendre that was being done during his lifetime. Non-Euclidean geometry, group theory, and similar developments were probably unknown to him.

The enrollment of the university during this period hovered between 50 and 150 young men. The instruction in those days was all conducted by what later became known as the “Moore method”. The proposal that, in the interest of efficiency, some classes be conducted by the “lecture method” led to a crisis, and all members of the faculty except Professor Church were fired. Those who didn’t want to lecture were hired back.

Alonzo Church’s great-grandson, Alonzo Church (1903-1995) was a mathematics professor at Princeton University and UCLA. He is properly credited with the development of the logic that underlies modern computers. He is responsible for the Church-Turing thesis, a simplistic formulation of this being “there is only one meaning that a function is computable”. This is a cornerstone of computation theory.

The family connection of the Alonzo Churches suggests a very interesting question: can mathematical aptitude be inherited?

For those interested in learning more about Alonzo S. Church, we recommend the following links:

http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/reed/
http://ugadog.com/heritage/campus-lore/the-portrait-of-dr-alonzo-church/