the original inventor of combinatory logic, moses schönfinkel, published nothing on combinatory logic after his original 1924 paper. haskell curry rediscovered the combinators while working as an instructor at princeton university in late 1927. in the late 1930s, alonzo church and his students at princeton invented a rival formalism for functional abstraction, the lambda calculus, which proved more popular than combinatory logic. the upshot of these historical contingencies was that until theoretical computer science began taking an interest in combinatory logic in the 1960s and 1970s, nearly all work on the subject was by haskell curry and his students, or by robert feys in belgium. curry and feys (1958), and curry "et al." (1972) survey the early history of combinatory logic. for a more modern treatment of combinatory logic and the lambda calculus together, see the book by barendregt, which reviews the models dana scott devised for combinatory logic in the 1960s and 1970s.