The study of the connections between mathematical automata and for mal logic is as old as theoretical computer science itself. In the founding paper of the subject, published in 1936, Turing showed how to describe the behavior of a universal computing machine with a formula of first order predicate logic, and thereby concluded that there is no algorithm for deciding the validity of sentences in this logic. Research on the log ical aspects of the theory of finite-state automata, which is the subject of this book, began in the early 1960's with the work of J. Richard Biichi on monadic second-order logic. Biichi's investigations were extended in several directions. One of these, explored by McNaughton and Papert in their 1971 monograph Counter-free Automata, was the characterization of automata that admit first-order behavioral descriptions, in terms of the semigroup theoretic approach to automata that had recently been developed in the work of Krohn and Rhodes and of Schiitzenberger. In the more than twenty years that have passed since the appearance of McNaughton and Papert's book, the underlying semigroup theory has grown enor mously, permitting a considerable extension of their results. During the same period, however, fundamental investigations in the theory of finite automata by and large fell out of fashion in the theoretical com puter science community, which moved to other concerns.

An advanced textbook giving a broad, modern view of the computational complexity theory of boolean circuits, with extensive references, for theoretical computer scientists and mathematicians.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Workshop of Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems 2011, held in Limburg, Germany, in July 2011. The 21 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The topics covered are automata, grammars, languages and related systems, various measures and modes of operations (e.g., determinism and nondeterminism); trade-offs between computational models and/or operations; succinctness of description of (finite) objects; state explosion-like phenomena; circuit complexity of Boolean functions and related measures; resource-bounded or structure-bounded environments; frontiers between decidability and undecidability; universality and reversibility; structural complexity; formal systems for applications (e.g., software reliability, software and hardware testing, modeling of natural languages); nature-motivated (bio-inspired) architectures and unconventional models of computing; Kolmogorov complexity.

Mathematical logic and automata theory are two scientific disciplines with a fundamentally close relationship. The authors of Logic and Automata take the occasion of the sixtieth birthday of Wolfgang Thomas to present a tour d’horizon of automata theory and logic. The twenty papers in this volume cover many different facets of logic and automata theory, emphasizing the connections to other disciplines such as games, algorithms, and semigroup theory, as well as discussing current challenges in the field.

From the Preface: We hope that this small volume will suggest directions of synergy and contact for future researchers to build upon, creating connections and making discoveries that will help explain some of the many mysteries of computation. Finite model theory can be succinctly described as the study of logics on finite structures. It is an area of research existing between mathematical logic and computer science. This area has been developing through continuous interaction with computational complexity, database theory, and combinatorics. The volume presents articles by leading researchers who delivered talks at the "Workshop on Finite Models and Descriptive Complexity" at Princeton in January 1996 during a DIMACS sponsored Special Year on Logic and Algorithms. Each article is self-contained and provides a valuable introduction to the featured research areas connected with finite model theory. This text will also be of interest to those working in discrete mathematics and combinatorics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Computer Science Logic, CSL 2007, held as the 16th Annual Conference of the EACSL in Lausanne, Switzerland. The 36 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of six invited lectures are organized in topical sections on logic and games, expressiveness, games and trees, logic and deduction, lambda calculus, finite model theory, linear logic, proof theory, and game semantics.

This book collects the refereed proceedings of the 6th Indian Conference on Logic and Its Applications, ICLA 2015, held in Mumbai, India, in January 2015. The volume contains 13 full revised papers along with 3 invited talks presented at the conference. The papers were selected after rigorous review, from 23 submissions. They cover topics related to pure and applied formal logic, foundations and philosophy of mathematics and the sciences, set theory, model theory, proof theory, areas of theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, systems of logic in the Indian tradition, and other disciplines which are of direct interest to mathematical and philosophical logic.