Starting at the beginning: Turing’s account examined

Abstract

Computability as an abstract notion, underlying any physical digital computation, was the focus of intense interest during the 1930s by mathematicians such as Gödel (1931), Turing (1936), Church (1936) and Post (1936). According to Turing’s analysis, digital computation is the process of effectively calculating the values of a function by some purely mechanical procedure executed by a TM. He argued that computation is reducible to carrying out a calculation by following instructions.