雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第4章:彼岸新星(5)

Newman wrote to the Secretary of the London Mathematical Society, F.P. White, explaining the position:

紐曼還寫信給倫敦數學協會的祕書官F.P.懷特解釋情況：

Dear White,

親愛的懷特：

I think you know the history of Turing's paper on Computable numbers.

我想你已知道圖靈在可計算數方面的工作。

Just as it was reaching its final state an offprint arrived, from Alonzo Church of Princeton, of a paper anticipating Turing's results to a large extent.

就在它即將終審時，普林斯頓的阿隆佐·丘奇給我寄來一篇論文，在很大程度上，與圖靈的成果有重複之處。

I hope it will nevertheless be possible to publish the paper.

但我仍然希望圖靈的論文可以出版，

The methods are to a large extent different, and the result is so important that different treatments of it should be of interest.

因爲他們二者採用的方法是很不一樣的。而且，他們的成果非常重要，所以不同方式的論證是有價值的。

The main result of both Turing and Church is that the Entscheidungs problem on which Hilbert's disciples have been working for a good many years—

圖靈和丘奇的主要成果，是證明了希爾伯特之後的學者研究了好幾年的判定性問題——

i.e. the problem of finding a mechanical way of deciding whether a given row of symbols is the enunciation of a theorem provable from the Hilbert axioms— is insoluble in its general form. …

即，找到一個機械的過程，來判定一組給定的符號，在希爾伯特公理體系中是否可證明——總體來說是無解的……

Alan reported to his mother on 29 May:

艾倫5月29日告訴他的母親：

I have just got my main paper ready and sent in. I imagine it will appear in October or November.

我剛完成了我的論文，已經寄出去了。我想它將會在10月或11月發表。

The situation with regard to the note for Comptes Rendus was not so good.

給《法國科學學刊》的評論很不順利，

It appears that the man I wrote to, and whom I asked to communicate the paper for me had gone to China, and moreover the letter seems to have been lost in the post, for a second letter reached his daughter.

收信的那個人到中國去了，我的信好像被郵局搞丟了，第二封信寄到他女兒那裏了。