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In mathematics, Church encoding is a means of representing data and operators in the lambda calculus. The Church numerals are 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.
Terms that are usually considered primitive in other notations are mapped to higher-order functions under Church encoding. The Church-Turing thesis asserts that any computable operator can be represented under Church encoding. In the untyped lambda calculus the only primitive data type is the function.