After 1935: Formal Languages and Algorithms, ‘Universal Machines’ and Electronic Solutions

Abstract

As late as 1930, mathematicians still did not perceive much call for formal syntactical descriptions of their notation. On the contrary, it was determined by tradition, with the result that separate schools of usage arose associated with different countries or cities, and sometimes with individual printers.

At the beginning of the 1930s, logicians, with their inborn need to question everything and influenced by explicit studies of derivation rules and systems, began to take notice of this; one such was Paul Hertz (1881–1940) in 1929. In 1930, Jan Lukasiewicz (1878–1956) informally introduced his bracket-free ‘Polish notation’.