abstract:In mathematics, Church encoding is a means of embedding data and operators into the lambda calculus, the most familiar form being the Church numerals, a representation of the natural numbers using lambda notation. The method is named for Alonzo Church, who first encoded data in the lambda calculus this way.
Dr. Church said he first considered encoding the novel "Moby Dick, " but then chose to use his own manuscript because its combination of words, pictures and JavaScript code would better showcase DNA's capacity to handle different kinds of information.