JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I was not going to write about this until it dawned on me that what happened here yesterday was a first in the history of computational logic--namely, that A.M. Turing was used to capture a baby bunny.
It was a cottontail, about 25 days old, and it got into our house of multiple cats, so it was imperative for us to find it before anything else did. The bunny was very scrappy and quick (as a bunny)--that is until it was confronted by the entry into the real world of computation and logic in the form of Turing's "On Computable Numbers" (1933) and "Computability and Definability" (1937), at which point the bunny (nicknamed "Baby") ran into a brick wall--actually, a thick wall, really.
After having cornered Baby in the kitchen I built a little fortress around it of dozens of volumes of The Journal of Symbolic Logic, which happily just happened to be on hand. Faced with this new Gargantua, the bunny simply froze in a last-ditch effort to confuse me or blend-in with the red flooring, a tactic which simply didn't work. The bunny was scooped up thanks to the gigantitude of Turing, and was able to continue its life without the bother of cats.
Even if one doesn't laugh, it might be tempting to do so with the addition of this footnote to the history of logic.
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