Newman wrote to the Secretary of the London Mathematical Society, F.P. White, explaining the position:
纽曼还写信给伦敦数学协会的秘书官F.P.怀特解释情况:
Dear White,
亲爱的怀特:
I think you know the history of Turing's paper on Computable numbers.
我想你已知道图灵在可计算数方面的工作。
Just as it was reaching its final state an offprint arrived, from Alonzo Church of Princeton, of a paper anticipating Turing's results to a large extent.
就在它即将终审时,普林斯顿的阿隆佐·丘奇给我寄来一篇论文,在很大程度上,与图灵的成果有重复之处。
I hope it will nevertheless be possible to publish the paper.
但我仍然希望图灵的论文可以出版,
The methods are to a large extent different, and the result is so important that different treatments of it should be of interest.
因为他们二者采用的方法是很不一样的。而且,他们的成果非常重要,所以不同方式的论证是有价值的。
The main result of both Turing and Church is that the Entscheidungs problem on which Hilbert's disciples have been working for a good many years—
图灵和丘奇的主要成果,是证明了希尔伯特之后的学者研究了好几年的判定性问题——
i.e. the problem of finding a mechanical way of deciding whether a given row of symbols is the enunciation of a theorem provable from the Hilbert axioms— is insoluble in its general form. …
即,找到一个机械的过程,来判定一组给定的符号,在希尔伯特公理体系中是否可证明——总体来说是无解的……
Alan reported to his mother on 29 May:
艾伦5月29日告诉他的母亲:
I have just got my main paper ready and sent in. I imagine it will appear in October or November.
我刚完成了我的论文,已经寄出去了。我想它将会在10月或11月发表。
The situation with regard to the note for Comptes Rendus was not so good.
给《法国科学学刊》的评论很不顺利,
It appears that the man I wrote to, and whom I asked to communicate the paper for me had gone to China, and moreover the letter seems to have been lost in the post, for a second letter reached his daughter.
收信的那个人到中国去了,我的信好像被邮局搞丢了,第二封信寄到他女儿那里了。