Time & Perspective Quote by Alonzo Church

There is a quiet demolition job happening inside Church's understatement. "I tried reading Hilbert" sounds almost casual, but coming from one of the 20th century's most formidable logicians, it's a reminder that mathematical greatness doesn't transmit cleanly through prose. Church isn't confessing ignorance; he's sketching the material reality of scholarship in an era before textbooks, lecture notes, translations, and the smoothing effect of secondary exposition. You got the work as it appeared: terse, periodical-bound, written for an inner circle already fluent in the problem-set and the idiom.

The line "Only his papers... were available" carries the subtext of access as destiny. Today, Hilbert is a brand: axiomatization, formalism, problems list, the whole mythos packaged for students. Church is pointing back to when Hilbert was just Hilbert on the page - compressed arguments, missing motivations, and a style that assumes the reader can reconstruct the connective tissue. It's also a faint critique of how we romanticize "primary sources" as purer. Sometimes they're simply brutal.

"Anybody who has tried those knows" is the social move: a collegial wink that turns private frustration into shared professional lore. It humanizes a field often treated as superhuman and, more pointedly, reframes difficulty as not merely intellectual but rhetorical. The context matters: Church's own work helped define formal readability in logic (lambda calculus, Church's thesis). His remark implicitly defends the value of interpretation, pedagogy, and better writing - not as dilution, but as the infrastructure that lets ideas travel.