When Alan Turing figured out computability theory, he was not doing pure math for math’s sake; he was trying to grok the nature of computation so that we could actually build better computers.
Are you sure this is true? I am not a Turing expert but my impression is that his practical work on building computing machinery was downstream of his theoretical work on the nature of computation, not vice versa.
My memory from reading Andrew Hodges’ authoritative biography of Turing is that his theory was designed as a tool to solve the Entscheidungsproblem, which was a pure mathematical problem posed by Hilbert. It just happened to be a convenient formalism for others later on. GPT-5 agrees with me.
Are you sure this is true? I am not a Turing expert but my impression is that his practical work on building computing machinery was downstream of his theoretical work on the nature of computation, not vice versa.
My memory from reading Andrew Hodges’ authoritative biography of Turing is that his theory was designed as a tool to solve the Entscheidungsproblem, which was a pure mathematical problem posed by Hilbert. It just happened to be a convenient formalism for others later on. GPT-5 agrees with me.
I’m not very confident about this, but it’s my current impression. Happy to have had it flagged!