Jacques Herbrand

…that had been offered by Jacques Herbrand, a French mathematician, and introduced a general concept of recursive functions—i.e., of functions mechanically computable by a finite series of purely combinatorial steps. In 1936 Alonzo Church, a mathematical logician, Alan Mathison Turing, originator of a theory of computability, and Emil L. Post,…

…he credited the idea to Jacques Herbrand), Stephen Cole Kleene and Alan Turing in 1936, Emil Post in 1944 (though his work was completed long before its publication), and A.A. Markov in 1951. These apparently quite different definitions turned out to be equivalent, a fact that supported the claim put…