User talk:Martin Davis

Hello and welcome. I'm leaping to the conclusion that you are Martin Davis.

There are issues with Hilbert's problems, that have only really come to light over time. What people naturally want is just to know what has been solved, and by whom. This turns out not to be that easy, in a number of the cases. Critical analysis of the original text is clearly called for; on the other hand our policy forbidding 'original research', if strictly applied, hampers any very interesting exploration of possible interpretations, restricting it to saying 'X reads this one way, Y another'. So, I'm not that happy with the idea that we can tabulate the answers, and there are certainly cases where a page on a given problem needs to be developed in a scholarly way also. Further, we would of course like to let the general public into the secret of why this all matters!

PS You can sign contributions as ~~~~.

Charles Matthews 12:56, 18 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ditto the welcome, ditto the leaping-to-conclusion here. Bill Bailey here: I wrote you before you went to Europe this summer about the source of the phrase "Halting problem".wvbaileyWvbailey 21:21, 12 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. Thanks. Martin Davis 22:48, 12 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Computability articles reorganization

Hopefully the top level Computability theory etc articles will soon be reorganized a bit more sensibly at long last, 3 years since you wrote in the talk page there! See Talk:Recursion_theory#Reorganize_the_Computability_articles Dmcq (talk) 19:50, 13 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]