The classic results obtained by Godel, Tarski, Kleene, and Church in the early thirties are the finest flowers of symbolic logic. They are of fundamental importance to those investigations of the foundations of mathematics via the concept of a formal system that were inaugurated by Frege, and of obvious significance to the mathematical disciplines, such as computability theory, that developed from them.

Derived from courses taught by the author over several years, this new exposition presents all of the results with their original proofs and central concepts in a manner that is unified by a systematic grounding of the notion of effectiveness in the semantics of the existential quantifier. Logicians and non-mathematicians, repelled by detail which is not obviously relevant in the standard textbooks, will be able to reach the heart of the matter with a minimum of fuss.