Frege: From Breakthrough to Despair
a calculational method that could show whether or not a proposed infer-
ence in Frege’s logic is correct reached its climax in 1936 with a proof that
no such general method exists. This was bad news for Leibniz’s dream.
However, in the very process of proving this negative result, Alan Turing
discovered something that would have delighted Leibniz: he found that it
was possible, in principle, to devise one single “universal” machine that,
all by itself, could carry out any possible computation.
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