The two main themes of this book, logic and complexity, are both essential for understanding the main problems about the foundations of mathematics. Logical Foundations of Mathematics and Computational Complexity covers a broad spectrum of results in logic and set theory that are relevant to the foundations, as well as the results in computational complexity and the interdisciplinary area of proof complexity. The author presents his ideas on how these areas are connected, what are the most fundamental problems and how they should be approached. In particular, he argues that complexity is as important for foundations as are the more traditional concepts of computability and provability. Emphasis is on explaining the essence of concepts and the ideas of proofs, rather than presenting precise formal statements and full proofs. Each section starts with concepts and results easily explained, and gradually proceeds to more difficult ones. The notes after each section present some formal definitions, theorems and proofs. Logical Foundations of Mathematics and Computational Complexity is aimed at graduate students of all fields of mathematics who are interested in logic, complexity and foundations. It will also be of interest for both physicists and philosophers who are curious to learn the basics of logic and complexity theory.

New and classical results in computational complexity, including interactive proofs, PCP, derandomization, and quantum computation. Ideal for graduate students.

The classical theory of computation has its origins in the work of Goedel, Turing, Church, and Kleene and has been an extraordinarily successful framework for theoretical computer science. The thesis of this book, however, is that it provides an inadequate foundation for modern scientific computation where most of the algorithms are real number algorithms. The goal of this book is to develop a formal theory of computation which integrates major themes of the classical theory and which is more directly applicable to problems in mathematics, numerical analysis, and scientific computing. Along the way, the authors consider such fundamental problems as: * Is the Mandelbrot set decidable? * For simple quadratic maps, is the Julia set a halting set? * What is the real complexity of Newton's method? * Is there an algorithm for deciding the knapsack problem in a ploynomial number of steps? * Is the Hilbert Nullstellensatz intractable? * Is the problem of locating a real zero of a degree four polynomial intractable? * Is linear programming tractable over the reals? The book is divided into three parts: The first part provides an extensive introduction and then proves the fundamental NP-completeness theorems of Cook-Karp and their extensions to more general number fields as the real and complex numbers. The later parts of the book develop a formal theory of computation which integrates major themes of the classical theory and which is more directly applicable to problems in mathematics, numerical analysis, and scientific computing.

This book contains revised versions of papers invited for presentation at the International Workshop on Logic and Computational Complexity, LCC '94, held in Indianapolis, IN in October 1994. The synergy between logic and computational complexity has gained importance and vigor in recent years, cutting across many areas. The 25 revised full papers in this book contributed by internationally outstanding researchers document the state-of-the-art in this interdisciplinary field of growing interest; they are presented in sections on foundational issues, applicative and proof-theoretic complexity, complexity of proofs, computational complexity of functionals, complexity and model theory, and finite model theory.

This book principally concerns the rapidly growing area of "Logical Complexity Theory", the study of bounded arithmetic, propositional proof systems, length of proof, etc and relations to computational complexity theory. Additional features of the book include (1) the transcription and translation of a recently discovered 1956 letter from K Godel to J von Neumann, asking about a polynomial time algorithm for the proof in k-symbols of predicate calculus formulas (equivalent to the P-NP question), (2) an OPEN PROBLEM LIST consisting of 7 fundamental and 39 technical questions contributed by many researchers, together with a bibliography of relevant references.

Logic and Complexity looks at basic logic as it is used in Computer Science, and provides students with a logical approach to Complexity theory. With plenty of exercises, this book presents classical notions of mathematical logic, such as decidability, completeness and incompleteness, as well as new ideas brought by complexity theory such as NP-completeness, randomness and approximations, providing a better understanding for efficient algorithmic solutions to problems. Divided into three parts, it covers: - Model Theory and Recursive Functions - introducing the basic model theory of propositional, 1st order, inductive definitions and 2nd order logic. Recursive functions, Turing computability and decidability are also examined. - Descriptive Complexity - looking at the relationship between definitions of problems, queries, properties of programs and their computational complexity. - Approximation - explaining how some optimization problems and counting problems can be approximated according to their logical form. Logic is important in Computer Science, particularly for verification problems and database query languages such as SQL. Students and researchers in this field will find this book of great interest.