Today in class was quite interesting. My professor started to talk about the origin of computational science, therefore the origins of computers and what they are today. He then proceeded into the geneological hierarchy of the key people who have developed the tools used in modern computing today. You could say that these people are the inventors of today’s technological advancement in computers. What is even more amazing is how closely linked I am to them. Below give you an idea of how I am related to the many people that developed the concepts of computers.

Alonzo Church was an advisor to Alan Turing who was an advisor to Stephen Kleene who was an advisor to Paul Axt who was an advisor to Alan Selman who was an advisor to John Geske who is an advisor to Anthony Montalbano (me).

If you’re wondering who all of these people are, I’ve included a brief bio of what each man has done.

Alonzo Church – Was an American mathematician and logician who was responsible for some of the foundations of theoretical computer science. He discovered the lambda calculus in 1936. The lambda calculus influenced the design of the LISP programming language and functional programming languages in general. The Church boolean is named in his honor. He and Turing showed that the lambda calculus and the Turing machine used in Turing’s halting problem were equivalent in capabilities, and subsequently demonstrated a variety of alternative “mechanical processes for computation” had equivalent computational abilities. This resulted in the Church-Turing thesis.

Alan Turing – Is often considered to be a father of modern computer science. With the Turing Test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He provided an influential formalisation of the concept of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, formulating the now widely accepted “Turing” version of the Church-Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model has either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine.

Stephen Kleene – was an American mathematician whose work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison helped lay the foundations for theoretical computer science. Kleene was best known for founding the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory together with Alonzo Church, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing and others; and for inventing regular expressions. By providing methods of determining which problems are solvable, Kleene’s work led to the study of which functions are computable function. The Kleene star, Kleene’s recursion theorem and the Ascending Kleene Chain are named after him.

Paul Axt – was an advanced logic and design professor at Penn State University. Axt worked under Kleene in developing higher ordered recursive functions and logic. An award, the Paul Axt Award was named after him. The award is given annually to a graduating Scholar who exemplifies those attributes which Paul Axt through the University Scholars Program. The Program which sought to foster through , and the intellectual curiosity and daring that lead to the development and pursuit of wide-ranging interests. The Paul Axt Award, which is considered to be the highest honor bestowed on a graduating Scholar.

Alan Selman – was a professor at Iowa State University. He has developed methods of describing key mathematical concepts and notations and subsequent chapters moving from the qualitative aspects of classical computability theory to the quantitative aspects of complexity theory. His main focus was on a theory that he came to call the Computability and Complexity Theory.

John Geske – is currently a professor at Kettering University. His major topic include the quantum aspects of computation. He is also the head advisor in the computer science division at Kettering. Geske also professes in discrete mathematics.

Anthony Montalbano (me) – I’m currently a computer science undergraduate at Kettering University hoping to study advanced methods of theoretical ways of graphic design. I also hope to embark on the digital media world of the internet. As of now what I have in logic that constitutes anything to the computer world can be found at www.anthonymontalbano.com

So there you have it! A complete list of the heirarchy and connections I have dating back the origin of computers the logic and computation that has been taken into consideration of the years to become the very advanced and astonishing machine know as the computer we have today! If you’d like to see how you maybe related to the many important people of computer science use the Theoretical Computer Science Genealogy, which can be found at http://sigact.acm.org/genealogy/index.html

(Ok, there’s your little history lesson of the day, how cool is it that you can say that you’re a descendant of the origin of computers?)

I’m done, back of in studying something that is highly relative to all of this, the theoritical methods of computation, laters!