Reviews for Computability and Unsolvability

The average rating for Computability and Unsolvability based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-11 00:00:00 Martin Naylor We are in 1958, Davis is writing from the border between mathematics and computer science. He assumes that you know a great deal about Turing machines, Godel's numbers + incompleteness theorems, and is familiar with their original notations. Non-mathematicians like myself might get scared with the notation (e.g. while wrestling with the "arithmetization theory of Turing machines", what?!); it may even make you cry. Then he goes incrementally showing operations with computable functions, recursive functions and difficulties with decision problems. One proof after another. The cross-references among the several theorems in this book will make you behave like a Turing machine going furiously back and forth trying to "compute" this book. A great challenge indeed.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-30 00:00:00 E.cordell Johnson Iv recommended by Scott Aaronson when I asked if there had been any investigation into why truth is such a mathematically strange concept.