Re: [Haskell-cafe] why the name lambda calculus?

From Cardone, Hindley "History of Lambda-calculus and Combinatory Logic"[1]:

"(By the way, why did Church choose the notation “λ”? In [Church, 1964, §2] he stated clearly that it came from the notation “ˆ x” used for class-abstraction by Whitehead and Russell, by first modifying “ˆ x” to “∧x” to distinguish function-abstraction from class-abstraction, and then changing “∧” to “λ” for ease of printing. This origin was also reported in [Rosser, 1984, p.338]. On the other hand, in his later years Church told two enquirers that the choice was more accidental: a symbol was needed and “λ” just happened to be chosen.)" [1] http://www-maths.swan.ac.uk/staff/jrh/papers/JRHHislamWeb.pdf -- Niklas 2011/8/21 Christopher Done :

IIRC Church found it easy to write on paper.

On 21 August 2011 21:11, Jack Henahan wrote:

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The short answer is "because Church said so". But yes, it is basically because λ is the abstraction operator in the calculus.

Why not alpha or beta calculus? What would we call alpha and beta conversion, then? :D

On Aug 21, 2011, at 12:37 PM, C K Kashyap wrote:

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Hi, Can someone please tell me what is the root of the name lambda calculus? Is it just because of the symbol lambda that is used? Why not alpha or beta calculus? Regards, Kashyap _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

Jack Henahan jhenahan@uvm.edu == Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. -- Edsger Dijkstra ==

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