Lambda Calculus - Foundation of Functional Programming

You have likely heard the term "Lambda Calculus" several times throughout your career, but never took the time to learn about it. That was me until recently. Now that I have gone down the rabbit hole, I can assure you that it is a mind-bending experience that is incredibly beautiful! Lambda Calculus was invented by Elonzo Church in 1936, well before the first computers existed. His goal was to study the nature of functions and how they can interact. This talk describes the concepts behind Lambda Calculus. It shows how in a system that only provides the ability to refer to variables, define functions, and apply functions, we can perform many operations that we take for granted in programming languages. These include Boolean logic and many forms of arithmetic.