A Variant to Turing's Theory of Computing Machines. Reprinted from Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. Volume 4, Number 1, January 1957.

WANG, Hao.

Published by Printed in the U.S.A., 1957

Original offprint of the paper introducing "the first formulation of Turing-machine theory in terms of computer-like models" (Minsky, p. 200), by the Chinese-American logician Hao Wang (1921-1995). In this paper Wang intends "to offer a theory which is closely related to Turing's but is more economical in the basic operations" (p. 63). Remembered as "a logician who sought a way to link mathematics to philosophy" (NYT), Wang received degrees from the National Southwestern Associated University and Tsinghua University in China before moving to the US to study logic under W. V. Quine at Harvard. After time spent at Oxford as the John Locke lecturer in philosophy, he served on the faculty of Harvard and Rockefeller University. He was also a close friend of Kurt Gödel and a founding president of the Gödel Society in Vienna. "His early mathematical achievements contributed to advances in computer science in the 1950s. While working for the International Business Machines Corporation, he discovered a faster way to prove certain kinds of logical truths using computers. He was awarded the Milestone Prize for Automated Theorem Proving for that work in 1983" (NYT). He gives his name to Wang tiles and the Wang B-machine, a simple computational model equivalent to the Turing machine. Wang's 1957 paper is uncommon: we cannot trace copies in commerce, nor institutionally. Marvin Minsky, Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, 1967; obituary in The New York Times, 17 May 1995. Octavo. Original pale blue printed wrappers, stapled. Light shelfwear, some faint creasing at upper edge, internally clean. A very good copy. Seller Inventory # 159673

Bibliographic Details

Title: A Variant to Turing's Theory of Computing ...
Publisher: Printed in the U.S.A., 1957
Edition: 1st Edition