alt Hacker NewsTheir structural properties are similar to Peano's definition in terms of 0 and successor operation. ChatGPT does a pretty good job of spelling out the formal structural connection¹ but I doubt anyone knows how exactly he came up with the definition other than Church.
¹https://chatgpt.com/share/693f575d-0824-8009-bdca-bf3440a195...
Yeah I've been meaning to send a request to Princeton's libraries with his notes but don't know what a good request looks like
The jump from "there is a successor operator" to "numbers take a successor operator" is interesting to me. I wonder if it was the first computer science-y "oh I can use this single thing for two things" moment! Obviously not the first in all of science/math/whatever but it's a very good idea