Computation is a familiar concept most of us understand intuitively. Take the function f(x) = x + 3. When x is three, f(3) = 3 + 3. Six. Easy. It seems obvious that this function is computable. But some functions aren’t so simple, and it’s not so easy to determine if they can be computed, meaning they may never give us a final answer. In 1928, the German mathematicians David Hilbert and Wilhelm...
