Alonzo Church

Alonzo Church was an American logician who took his first degree at Princeton in 1924 and his doctorate there in 1927 under Oswald Veblen, with a dissertation titled Alternatives to Zermelo's Assumption. He joined the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor in 1929, and in the 1930s Princeton became an exciting centre for logic, with Church teaching his students Rosser and Kleene alongside John von Neumann. Alan Turing arrived there in 1936 as a visiting graduate student and stayed to complete his Ph.D. under Church. Church published The Calculi of Lambda-Conversion in 1941, a polished version of his 1936 lectures on the lambda calculus. In 1967 he left Princeton for the University of California at Los Angeles as Kent Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Mathematics.