[FOM] Kleene's T predicate

[Daniel Schwartz]

Thanks to Martin Davis for the historical clarification.  Since Turing's
famous paper on computability was published in 1936, it does seem unlikely
that Kleene would have known about it when he invented the "T" predicate (at
least one year earlier).

But this then still leaves open the question: what does the "T" stand for,
if anything?

--Dan Schwartz

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Martin Davis <martin at eipye.com> wrote:

> Trying to find a connection with Turing is hopelessly anachronistic. The
> first version of the T predicate was introduced in Kleene's paper "General
> Recursive Functions of Natural Numbers" Mathematische Annalen vol.
> 112(1936) 727-742.
> A footnote reads: "Presented to the American Mathematical Society,
> September 1935." The paper refers to works by Ackermann, Péter, Gödel, and
> Skolem, but not Turing.