The aim of this monograph is to give a self-contained introduction to the modern theory of finite transformation semigroups with a strong emphasis on concrete examples and combinatorial applications. It covers the following topics on the examples of the three classical finite transformation semigroups: transformations and semigroups, ideals and Green's relations, subsemigroups, congruences, endomorphisms, nilpotent subsemigroups, presentations, actions on sets, linear representations, cross-sections and variants. The book contains many exercises and historical comments and is directed first of all to both graduate and postgraduate students looking for an introduction to the theory of transformation semigroups, but also to tutors and researchers.

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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Workshop of Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems, DCFS 2013, held in London, ON, Canada, in July 2013. The 22 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The topics covered are automata, grammars, languages and other formal systems; various modes of operations and complexity measures; co-operating systems; succinctness of description of objects, state-explosion-like phenomena; circuit complexity of Boolean functions and related measures; size complexity and structural complexity of formal systems; trade-offs between computational models and mode of operation; applications of formal systems; for instance in software and hardware testing, in dialogue systems, in systems modeling or in modeling natural languages; and their complexity constraints; size or structural complexity of formal systems for modeling natural languages; complexity aspects related to the combinatorics of words; descriptional complexity in resource-bounded or structure-bounded environments; structural complexity as related to descriptional complexity; frontiers between decidability and undecidability; universality and reversibility; nature-motivated (bio-inspired) architectures and unconventional models of computing; Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity, algorithmic information.

This book contains a collection of fifteen articles and is dedicated to the sixtieth birthdays of Lex Renner and Mohan Putcha, the pioneers of the field of algebraic monoids. Topics presented include: structure and representation theory of reductive algebraic monoids monoid schemes and applications of monoids monoids related to Lie theory equivariant embeddings of algebraic groups constructions and properties of monoids from algebraic combinatorics endomorphism monoids induced from vector bundles Hodge–Newton decompositions of reductive monoids A portion of these articles are designed to serve as a self-contained introduction to these topics, while the remaining contributions are research articles containing previously unpublished results, which are sure to become very influential for future work. Among these, for example, the important recent work of Michel Brion and Lex Renner showing that the algebraic semi groups are strongly π-regular. Graduate students as well as researchers working in the fields of algebraic (semi)group theory, algebraic combinatorics and the theory of algebraic group embeddings will benefit from this unique and broad compilation of some fundamental results in (semi)group theory, algebraic group embeddings and algebraic combinatorics merged under the umbrella of algebraic monoids.

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 22nd IFIP WG 1.5International Workshop on Cellular Automata and Discrete ComplexSystems, AUTOMATA 2016, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in June 2016. This volume contains 3 invited talks in full-paper length and 12 regularpapers, which were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 23submissions. The papers feature research on all fundamental aspects of cellular automata and related discrete complex systems and deal with the following topics: dynamical, topological, ergodic and algebraic aspects; algorithmic and complexity issues; emergent properties; formal language processing; symbolic dynamics; models of parallelism and distributed systems; timing schemes; phenomenological descriptions; scientific modeling; and practical applications.

This book offers an original account of the theory of near-rings, with a considerable amount of material which has not previously been available in book form, some of it completely new. The book begins with an introduction to the subject and goes on to consider the theory of near-fields, transformation near-rings and near-rings hosted by a group. The bulk of the chapter on near-fields has not previously been available in English. The transformation near-rings chapters considerably augment existing knowledge and the chapters on product hosting are essentially new. Other chapters contain original material on new classes of near-rings and non-abelian group cohomology. The Theory of Near-Rings will be of interest to researchers in the subject and, more broadly, ring and representation theorists. The presentation is elementary and self-contained, with the necessary background in group and ring theory available in standard references.