Abstract
A quick tour through my long career with emphasis on how computer science has affected me and how I have affected computer science.
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Notes
- 1.
He was my adviser.
- 2.
Church was Turing’s adviser as well. But Turing’s computability paper was written before he became a Princeton student to work with Church.
- 3.
He was my teacher when I was an undergraduate at City College in New York.
- 4.
Other terms for this notion are recursively enumerable set and computably enumerable set.
- 5.
The report is available at [18] as Appendix A pp. 374–408.
- 6.
Our proof had a flaw. It used the fact that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions consisting entirely of prime numbers. This fact was only proved in 2004 (by Ben Green and Terrence Tao); so we had to call it a hypothesis. We wrote our work up for our funding agency, the Office of Scientific Research of the US Air Force. We also submitted it for publication to a mathematical research journal. In addition we sent a copy to Julia Robinson whose methods had greatly influenced our approach. To our delight she succeeded in modifying the proof so it did not need this as yet unproved proposition. We withdrew our paper, and the theorem was published with the three of us as authors. It followed from the new result that my conjecture would follow if a single polynomial could be found that satisfied two simple conditions that Julia had proposed. After the three of us had been trying for a decade to find such a polynomial, we learned that Yuri Matiyasevich, at the age of 22, had actually done it. His proof that his equation satisfied Julia’s conditions, though quite elementary, was intricate and beautiful.
- 7.
Don later was one of my first PhD students, and, still later, a colleague.
- 8.
Of course the terms “divide-and-conquer” and “stack” were not yet used in computer science at that time. It may be worth mentioning that both III and III\(^*\) are already in the report [15] that Hilary and I had prepared for the NSA.
- 9.
Jack and I did publish a joint paper based on this which provided a path to my Erdös number 3. There was another path via Yuri Matiyasevich.
- 10.
Parts of this paragraph were copied verbatim from my [10].
- 11.
In writing about Turing’s work at Bletchley Park, I made the error of indicating that the Colossus was built to decrypt the Enigma traffic needed for the safety of Atlantic shipping. The Colossus was built to deal with an entirely different traffic.
References
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Davis, M. (2020). Seventy Years of Computer Science. In: Blass, A., Cégielski, P., Dershowitz, N., Droste, M., Finkbeiner, B. (eds) Fields of Logic and Computation III. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12180. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48006-6_8
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