I just remembered a talk I did on Alonzo Church's Untyped Lambda Calculus earlier this year. (they call it a "Proseminar") The Lambda Calculus is a very simple but turing-complete functional model of computability, that means every computable function can be expressed as a Lambda expression in it, but its functional nature means that it is ideal for proving mathematical statements about programmes. And the beauty of it is that if you add a bit of syntactic sugar, you already have a very usable functional programming language, so I think every computer scientist should have at least a basic understanding of it.
So I decided to upload the slides and the paper. I know there are plenty of those on the web already, but nevertheless, I don't see why I should let those PDFs rot on my hard disc. If you have any questions on the PDFs or you find mistakes, bad spelling or grammar or stray bits of German that I missed in the translation, feel free to send an email to the address on the first slide.
Prerequisites: knowing what a function is.
Slides (English, 294 kB)
Paper (English, 139 kB)
Slides (German, 299 kB)
Paper (German, 138 kB)
By the way: the lambda expression referenced in the "Yo dawg" picture is called the Omega combinator, a very interesting expression which is explained in detail in the paper.
