This book develops a theory of formal power series in noncommuting variables, the main emphasis being on results applicable to automata and formal language theory. This theory was initiated around 196O-apart from some scattered work done earlier in connection with free groups-by M. P. Schutzenberger to whom also belong some of the main results. So far there is no book in existence concerning this theory. This lack has had the unfortunate effect that formal power series have not been known and used by theoretical computer scientists to the extent they in our estimation should have been. As with most mathematical formalisms, the formalism of power series is capable of unifying and generalizing known results. However, it is also capable of establishing specific results which are difficult if not impossible to establish by other means. This is a point we hope to be able to make in this book. That formal power series constitute a powerful tool in automata and language theory depends on the fact that they in a sense lead to the arithmetization of automata and language theory. We invite the reader to prove, for instance, Theorem IV. 5. 3 or Corollaries III. 7. 8 and III. 7.- all specific results in language theory-by some other means. Although this book is mostly self-contained, the reader is assumed to have some background in algebra and analysis, as well as in automata and formal language theory.

This introductory text covers the key areas of computer science, including recursive function theory, formal languages, and automata. Additions to the second edition include: extended exercise sets, which vary in difficulty; expanded section on recursion theory; new chapters on program verification and logic programming; updated references and examples throughout.

The Mathematical Theory of L Systems

Computability, Complexity, and Languages: Fundamentals of Theoretical Computer Science provides an introduction to the various aspects of theoretical computer science. Theoretical computer science is the mathematical study of models of computation. This text is composed of five parts encompassing 17 chapters, and begins with an introduction to the use of proofs in mathematics and the development of computability theory in the context of an extremely simple abstract programming language. The succeeding parts demonstrate the performance of abstract programming language using a macro expansion technique, along with presentations of the regular and context-free languages. Other parts deal with the aspects of logic that are important for computer science and the important theory of computational complexity, as well as the theory of NP-completeness. The closing part introduces the advanced recursion and polynomial-time computability theories, including the priority constructions for recursively enumerable Turing degrees. This book is intended primarily for undergraduate and graduate mathematics students.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference, ICGI 2004, held in Athens, Greece in October 2004. The 20 revised full papers and 8 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The topics of the papers presented range from theoretical results of learning algorithms to innovative applications of grammatical inference and from learning several interesting classes of formal grammars to estimations of probabilistic grammars.

Annotation This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 32nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2005, held in Lisbon, Portugal in July 2005. The 113 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 407 submissions. The papers address all current issues in theoretical computer science and are organized in topical sections on data structures, cryptography and complexity, cryptography and distributed systems, graph algorithms, security mechanisms, automata and formal languages, signature and message authentication, algorithmic game theory, automata and logic, computational algebra, cache-oblivious algorithms and algorithmic engineering, on-line algorithms, security protocols logic, random graphs, concurrency, encryption and related primitives, approximation algorithms, games, lower bounds, probability, algebraic computation and communication complexity, string matching and computational biology, quantum complexity, analysis and verification, geometry and load balancing, concrete complexity and codes, and model theory and model checking.