Math is said to be the language of the universe. Through math, we hoped to describe the laws that govern all relationships – in math lies our aspiration for conceptual truth.
But just as quantum physics created an existential crisis for physicists who sought to define a physical truth in matter, math was shortly to suffer its own existential crisis.
In 1930, Kurt Gödel, a German logician, mathematician, and philosopher, presented his incompleteness theorems that demonstrated that no mathematical system could prove its own truth, completely upending any possibility that we could define an inherent truth through math.
His findings tormented mathematicians but also unleashed incredible new potential. If math could not prove its own truth, what could it let us imagine? Alonzo Church was a logician and mathematician that walked into this creative unknown.
Influenced by Whitehead and Russell, Church developed lambda calculus in the 1930s to create a framework that allowed mathematicians to develop _abstractions_ of _poetic meaning_ that felt, well, _magical_.
Lambda calculus lies at the heart of all modern computer languages, enabling programmers to develop increasingly more powerful algorithms that unleash the analytical and creative potential of computers – a potential that empowers computer-enabled creativity, the potential that is defining this new age.
Church used the greek character 'lambda' to represent a transformational expression that could be defined as a function. These functions could then be used to construct increasingly more complex recursive algorithms, which the power of each could be used by simply referring to its name.
This potential gave computer programmers the capacity to wield words like a poet with the metaphoric power of abstraction.
The synthesis of abstractions into higher-level meaning in magical moments that unleash new creative potential.
Next: Many Paths
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