  Part of the impetus for the drive to codify what is computable came from the mathematician David Hilbert. Hilbert believed that all of mathematics could be precisely axiomatized. Once this was done, there would be an “effective procedure”, i.e., an algorithm that would take as input any precise mathematical statement, and, after a finite number of steps, decide whether the statement was true or false. Hilbert was asking for what would now be called a decision procedure for all of mathematics.