Who first discovered that some R.E. sets are not recursive?
According to the paper of Emil Post "Recursively Enumerable Sets of Positive Integers and Their Decision Problems" (1944):
Basic to the entire theory is the following result we must credit to Church, Rosser, Kleene, jointly.
THEOREM. There exists a recursively enumerable set of positive integers which is not recursive.
Cited are three papers all from 1936:
- "An unsolvable problem of elementary number theory" (Church)
- "General recursive functions of natural numbers" (Kleene)
- "Extensions.of some theorems of Gödel and Church"(Rosser)
The Post paper and its three predecessors are all collected in Martin Davis's anthology The Undecidable.