Church–Turing thesis
Thesis on the nature of computability
Why this is trending
Interest in “Church–Turing thesis” spiked on Wikipedia on 2026-02-25.
Categorised under Arts & Culture, this article fits a familiar pattern. wt.cat.arts.2
At GlyphSignal we surface these trending signals every day—transforming Wikipedia’s vast pageview data into actionable insights about global curiosity.
Key Takeaways
- In computability theory, the Church–Turing thesis (also known as computability thesis , the Turing–Church thesis , the Church–Turing conjecture , Church's thesis , Church's conjecture , and Turing's thesis ) is a thesis about the nature of computable functions.
- The thesis is named after American mathematician Alonzo Church and the British mathematician Alan Turing.
In computability theory, the Church–Turing thesis (also known as computability thesis, the Turing–Church thesis, the Church–Turing conjecture, Church's thesis, Church's conjecture, and Turing's thesis) is a thesis about the nature of computable functions. It states that a function on the natural numbers can be calculated by an effective method if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine. The thesis is named after American mathematician Alonzo Church and the British mathematician Alan Turing. Before the precise definition of computable function, mathematicians often used the informal term effectively calculable to describe functions that are computable by paper-and-pencil methods. In the 1930s, several independent attempts were made to formalize the notion of computability:
Content sourced from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0
