Background
Alonzo Church was born on June 14, 1903, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. He was the son of Samuel Robbins and Mildred Hannah Letterman (Parker) Church.
educator mathematician scientist
Alonzo Church was born on June 14, 1903, in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. He was the son of Samuel Robbins and Mildred Hannah Letterman (Parker) Church.
Church got Bachelor of Arts degree at Princeton University in 1924, and Doctor of Philosophy degree at Princeton University in 1927. He was an Honorary Doctor of Science at the same university, 1985.
Alonzo became an Honorary Doctor of Science in Case Western Reserve University, 1969, and an Honorary Doctor of Science in State University of New York, Buffalo, 1990.
Church taught mathematics and philosophy at Princeton from 1929 to 1967. That same year he became a professor of mathematics and philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles and worked there until his retirement in 1990. Simultaneously he edited the Journal of Symbolic Logic from 1936 to 1979. He was the Editor of The Journal of Symbolic Logic for many years and contributed a vast array of review articles to that Journal, many of considerable interest in their own tight.
Church was a member of American Academy Arts and Sciences, Association Symbolic Logic, American Mathematics Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Sciences and British Academy (as a correspondent).
Church’s private life is very quiet and unremarkable. As Andrew Hodges said in his biography of Alan Turing (Church’s famed student, who killed himself in 1954 after being arrested on homosexual charges), Church “[is] a retiring man himself, not given to a great deal of discussion.”
Church married Mary Julia Kuczinski on August 25, 1925. She deceased on February 1976. They had 3 children – Alonzo, Mary Anna and Mildred Warner.