quality:correction, information:classification
History

The origin of the Entscheidungsproblem goes back to Gottfried Leibniz, who in the seventeenth century, after having constructed a successful mechanical calculating machine, dreamt of building a machine that could manipulate symbols in order to determine the truth values of mathematical statements. He realized that the first step would have to be a clean formal language, and much of his subsequent work was directed toward that goal. In 1928, David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann posed the question in the form outlined above.

In continuation of his "program", Hilbert posed three questions at an international conference in 1928, the third of which became known as "Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem ". In 1929, Moses Schönfinkel published one paper on special cases of the decision problem, that was prepared by Paul Bernays.

As late as 1930, Hilbert believed that there would be no such thing as an unsolvable problem.