COMPUTING 2011
International Symposium at KIT celebrates 75 Years of Turing Machine and Lambda-Calculus
On October 20 - 21, the international symposium »COMPUTING 2011« at KIT celebrated the 75th anniversary of two pioneering works on the theory of computation: On computable numbers, with an application to the “Entscheidungsproblem” by Alan Turing, and An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory by Alonzo Church.
»Turing’s and Church’s works have been a fundamental breakthrough in Computer Science«, explains Dr. Olga Tveretina, symposium chair and computer scientist at the Institute of Theoretical Informatics at KIT. »Their models of computation had an unparalleled influence on modern computer science by bridging the gap between the theory of computation and the implementation of computing machines«, Tveretina further states. Turing and Church were especially interested in one of the foundational questions in the philosophy of computer science: the question of what it means for a task to be computable.
COMPUTING 2011 has been organized by the Institute of Cryptography and Security (IKS) and the Institute of Theoretical Informatics (ITI) of KIT with kind support of Karlsruhe House of Young Scientists (KHYS) and Karlsruher Universitätsgesellschaft.
The symposium, which was attended by 46 scientists from seven countries, reviewed the work of Church and Turing and its influence on contemporary Theoretical Computer Science through top level talks of internationally renowned computer scientists such as Dr. Christof Teuscher from Portland University in the United States, Professor Henk Barendregt from the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Professor Wolfgang Thomas from RWTH Aachen University. Apart from these established experts, a large number of promising young scientists from different countries contributed talks that covered topics like Computational Geometry, Models of Computing, Complexity or Termination Analysis.
Further information is available on the Web under http://baldur.iti.kit.edu/Computing2011