The Universal Turing Machine

This volume commemorates the work of Alan Turing, because it was Turing who not only introduced the most persuasive and influential concept of a machine model of effective computability, but who also anticipated in his work the diversity of topics brought together here.

Turing's paper "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheindungs problem" which appeared in print in 1937, contained Turing's thesis that every `effective' computation can be programmed on a Turing machine. Furthermore it contained the unsolvability of the halting problem and of the decision problem for first-order logic, and it presented the invention of the universal Turing machine. The publication of this idea is acknowledged as a landmark of the computer age.

This volume explores the historical aspect, and the influence and applications of these ideas.