section_path: Early life and education/University and work on computability
section_name: University and work on computability
paragraph_text: University and work on computability
  
  After graduating from Sherborne, Turing applied for several Cambridge colleges scholarships, including Trinity and King's, eventually earning an £80 per annum scholarship (equivalent to about £4,300 as of 2023) to study at the latter. There, Turing studied the undergraduate course in Schedule B (that is, a three-year Parts I and II, of the Mathematical Tripos, with extra courses at the end of the third year, as Part III only emerged as a separate degree in 1934) from February 1931 to November 1934 at King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded first-class honours in mathematics. His dissertation, On the Gaussian error function, written during his senior year and delivered in November 1934 (with a deadline date of 6 December) proved a version of the central limit theorem. It was finally accepted on 16 March 1935. By spring of that same year, Turing started his master's course (Part III)—which he completed in 1937—and, at the same time, he published his first paper, a one-page article called Equivalence of left and right almost periodicity (sent on 23 April), featured in the tenth volume of the Journal of the London Mathematical Society. Later that year, Turing was elected a Fellow of King's College on the strength of his dissertation where he served as a lecturer. However, and, unknown to Turing, this version of the theorem he proved in his paper, had already been proven, in 1922, by Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg. Despite this, the committee found Turing's methods original and so regarded the work worthy of consideration for the fellowship. Abram Besicovitch 's report for the committee went so far as to say that if Turing's work had been published before Lindeberg's, it would have been "an important event in the mathematical literature of that year".
  
  Between the springs of 1935 and 1936, at the same time as Church, Turing worked on the decidability of problems, starting from Gödel's incompleteness theorems. In mid-April 1936, Turing sent Max Newman the first draft typescript of his investigations. That same month, Alonzo Church published his An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory, with similar conclusions to Turing's then-yet unpublished work. Finally, on 28 May of that year, he finished and delivered his 36-page paper for publication called " On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem ". It was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society journal in two parts, the first on 30 November and the second on 23 December. In this paper, Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel 's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with the formal and simple hypothetical devices that became known as Turing machines. The Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) was originally posed by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1928. Turing proved that his "universal computing machine" would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm. He went on to prove that there was no solution to the decision problem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable: it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether a Turing machine will ever halt. This paper has been called "easily the most influential math paper in history".
  
  Although Turing's proof was published shortly after Alonzo Church 's equivalent proof using his lambda calculus, Turing's approach is considerably more accessible and intuitive than Church's. It also included a notion of a 'Universal Machine' (now known as a universal Turing machine), with the idea that such a machine could perform the tasks of any other computation machine (as indeed could Church's lambda calculus). According to the Church–Turing thesis, Turing machines and the lambda calculus are capable of computing anything that is computable. John von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to Turing's paper. To this day, Turing machines are a central object of study in theory of computation.
  
  From September 1936 to July 1938, Turing spent most of his time studying under Church at Princeton University, in the second year as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow. In addition to his purely mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier. In June 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Princeton; his dissertation, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, introduced the concept of ordinal logic and the notion of relative computing, in which Turing machines are augmented with so-called oracles, allowing the study of problems that cannot be solved by Turing machines. John von Neumann wanted to hire him as his postdoctoral assistant, but he went back to the United Kingdom.