Emil Post Anticipated (more than anticipated) Godel and Turing

 (Thanks to James De Santis for pointing the article that inspired this post on Post. The article is pointed to in this post.)

What is Emil Post known for? I know of him for the following:

a) Post's Problem: Show that there is an r.e. set A that is strictly in between Decidable and Halt using Turing Reductions. He posed the problem in 1944. It was solved in 1956 by the priority method, simultaneously invented by Friedberg and Muchnik . (My students wondered who posted to the web first and if the other one could have seen it there.)

b) He invented Post Tag Systems, a natural problem that is undecidable. Or a model of computation. Depends on how you look at it.

c) The Kleene-Post Theorem which produces a set A that is strictly in between Decidable and Halt. It did not solve Post's Problem since A is not r.e. The proof used forcing and may have been the first or close to the first use of forcing. This was published in 1954.

In summary, I thought of Post as being a recursion theorist. 

 The more I read about Post the more I realize that calling him a recursion theorist is wrong but in an interesting way. Back in the 1950's  I am sure Emil Post was called a logician. The over-specialization that produces Recursion Theorists, Model Theorists, Set Theorists, Proof Theorist was about a decade away. In fact, people who worked in logic often also worked in other parts of math. (Post worked on Laplace Transforms. See The Post Inversion Formula as part of the Wikipedia entry on Laplace Transforms.)

I recently read the article, Emil Post and His Anticipation of Godel and Turing which shows that Post really did have some of the ideas of Godel and Turing at about the same time, and possibly before they did. I will discuss briefly what he did and why it is not better known; however, the article is worth reading for more on this.

What did Post Do? 

Part of Post's Thesis (1920) was showing that the Propositional Logic in Russell-Whitehead was consistent and complete. 

He tried to show that all of RW was consistent and complete. He got RW down to a normal form; however, he realized that rather than reducing the complexity he just localized it. In 1921 he noted the following (I quote the article).

a) Normal Systems can simulate any symbolic logic, indeed any mechanical system for proving theorems.

b) This means, however, that all such systems can be mechanically listed, and the diagonal argument  shows that the general problem of deciding whether a given theorem is produced by a given system is unsolvable.

c) It follows, in turn, that no consistent mechanical system can produce all theorems.

Wow- that sounds like the outline of a proof of Godel's Incompleteness theorem!

Why Didn't Post Publish This? 

 In 1921 Post suffered his first (of many) attacks of manic-depression. He was unable to get an academic job until 1935.  By the time he could have written a paper, his ideas were already known. Note that the items about Post I knew are all post-1940.

The Story is Interesting Because its Boring

There is no interesting conflicts between mathematicians in this story. No Newton vs Leibniz rap battle (see here) no plagiarism. Just bad timing and bad luck. So this story is not even worth  being exaggerated. 

But I find that interesting. Timing and Luck play a big role, perhaps bigger than is commonly thought.