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For non–computer scientists, Church is a founder of the field. He developed a mathematical model of computation, Lambda Calculus, in the 1930's, a decade before the earliest electronic computer.
To functional programmers, he's easily among the most influential and brilliant of the field, providing a model for programming far more elegant, expressive, and safe than the popular and easy imperative languages.
From his student:
- He spoke slowly in complete paragraphs which seemed to have been read out of a book
- Every lecture began with a ten-minute ceremony of erasing the blackboard until it was absolutely spotless.
- His pauses, hesitations, emphases, his betrayals of emotion (however rare), and sundry other nonverbal phenomena taught us a lot more logic than any written text could. We learned to think in unison with him as he spoke, as if following the demonstration of a calisthenics instructor. Church's course permanently improved the rigor of our reasoning.
- Occasionally, he carelessly skipped a letter in a word
Does anyone else do that? I'll finish writing a word and notice a random letter is missing. No idea why.