Generating, Solving and the Mathematics of Homo Sapiens: Emil Post’s Views on Computation

Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, Belgium

This research was supported by the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders, Belgium. I would like to thank the people at the Manuscripts Department, American Philosophical Society for their assistance with the Emil Leon Post papers as well as the people at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library for their assistance with the Alonzo Church papers. I am also indebted to Maurice Margenstern for some very interesting discussions on (the nature of) computation (in nature) especially on the significance of tag systems and research on the boundaries of decidability and undecidability.