Paper detail

Thue's 1914 paper: a translation

This paper includes notes to accompany a reading of Thue's 1914 paper "Probleme uber Veranderungen von Zeichenreihen nach gegebenen Reglen", along with a translation of that paper. Thue's 1914 paper is mainly famous for proving an early example of an undecidable problem, cited prominently by Post. However, Post's paper principally makes use of the definition of Thue systems, described on the first two pages of Thue's paper, and does not depend on the more specific results in the remainder of Thue's paper. A closer study of the remaining parts of that paper highlight a number of important themes in the history of computing: the transition from algebra to formal language theory, the analysis of the "computational power" (in a pre-1936 sense) of rules, and the development of algorithms to generate rule-sets.