FOM: Opinions on place to start considering computation....

[Stephen Fenner]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2001, Steve Stevenson wrote:

> Suppose you have a colleague who just arrived from Mars. This
> colleague is interested in knowing what Earth mathematicians consider
> to be {\em computation}. They are impatient and want to read as few
> pages as possible.
>
> Question: what is your reading list?

Davis, Sigal, & Weyuker -- Chapters 1-4.  They give a computational model
that is especially simple and clean pedagogically, and a universal program
can be described quite easily.  This is my favorite model to teach
computability to students, some of which might as well have come from
Mars ;-)

Rogers is certainly a good choice, too.

Steve