## (3,2): Church's Wandering > _I never had any mathematical conversations with anybody,_ > _because there was nobody else in my field._ > -Alonzo Church (Son of Sam) In the first year of the twentieth century of the Old Calendar,[^1] David of Göttingen had problems. And in the fourth year of that century,[^2] In the capital city of the Old Country, Alonzo Church, son of Sam[^3][^4], was born. %% [^5] %% And Church was grown. And he was a Foundational Person. And he studied the Foundations of Mathematics,[^6] And he was not impressed. He'd have none of the assumption called Choice.[^7] And having no choice, he chose. To make a new Foundation and Church. Was alone in the world, with no one else in his field. Because the field was not yet in the world. And he was lonely. And it was the thirty third year of that century when Church said[^8] > \[Let there be a new\][^9] set of postulates for the foundation of formal logic, in which we \[will\][^10] avoid use of the free, or real, variable, and in which we introduce a certain restriction on the law of excluded middle as a means of avoiding the paradoxes[^11] connected with the mathematics of the transfinite.[^12] And Church said > every combination of symbols belonging to our system, if it represents a proposition at all, shall represent a particular proposition, unambigouously, and without the addition of verbal explanations. Because he knew the other foundations required verbal explanations. And he did not see them to be mechanistic. And he did not see them to be Foundations. So Church made a new Foundations. A system not of Logic, but of the Foundations of Logic. And Church's system was inconsistent. Proving every lie and every truth. And Church saw that it was empty of meaning. And he was ashamed. And it was the thirty fourth year of that century when Church said[^13] > In a recent paper the author proposed a set of postulates which, it was believed, would lead to a system of mathematical logic free of some of the complications entailed by Bertrand Russell’s theory of types, and would at the same time avoid the well known paradoxes,[^11] in particular the Russell paradox,[^11] by weakening the classical principle of reductio ad absurdum. But, in the course of working with these postulates,[^8] it has since become clear that the set as originally given requires some modification in order to render it free from contradiction. Now the system was all in ashes. And contradictions were in it. And in the ashes of the failed system lay a seed. The seed was called lambda. It was in the system, but it was not the system. And Church took lambda out of that system. And for rest of the years of that century, Lambda was in the world. But the world had not overcome[^14] it. --- There was a man with Church who was Clean.[^15] He was with Church in the beginning. He was not lambda. But only through him Church came to understand lambda. And Church called[^16] his name, saying, > He who comes after me[^17] has surpassed me, > because he is Clean.[^18] Through these three, we learned how to make all things. Through no one alone, But through them. goto: [[lost+found/3/3|3/3]] [^1]: i.e., 1900. [^2]: i.e., 1903. [^3]: Son of Alonzo Church.[^5] [^4]: Brother of Alonzo Church.[^3] [^5]: Son of Alonzo Church. [^6]: Church 1927, _Alternatives to Zermelo's Assumption._ PhD dissertation. [^7]: Ibid. [^8]: Church 1932, _A Set of Postulates for the Foundation of Logic._ [^9]: Not in the original text. [^10]: Ibid. [^11]: See [[lost+found/1/4#The Beginning|1/4]]. [^12]: See [[lost+found/1/1|1/1]]-[[lost+found/1/1|1/3]] [^13]: Church 1933, _A Set of Postulates for the Foundation of Logic (Second Paper)._ [^14]: Or _understood._ [^15]: Or _whose name was Clean._ [^16]: Lit. "cite", from Old French _citation_ or directly from Latin _citationem_ (nominative _citatio_) "a command," noun of action from past participle stem of _citare_ "to summon, urge, call; put in sudden motion, call forward; rouse, excite" [^17]: Lit. "works under me." [^18]: "Kleene" in the original.