A Course In Formal Languages, Automata And Groups, By Ian Chiswell

Book in very good condition. Pages clean and unmarked. Spine strained between pages 34-35, although pages still well attached. Cover also in very good condition, with minimal corner wear. This book is based on notes for a master's course given at Queen Mary, University of London, in the 1998/9 session. Such courses in London are quite short, and the course consisted essentially of the material in the first three chapters, together with a two-hour lecture on connections with group theory. Chapter 5 is a considerably expanded version of this. The ulterior motive in the ?rst three chapters is to give a rigorous proof that various notions of recursively enumerable language are equivalent. Three such notions are considered. These are: generated by a type 0 grammar, recognised by a Turing machine (deterministic or not) and defined by means of a Godel numbering, having defined "recursively enumerable" for sets of natural numbers. It is hoped that this has been achieved without too many arguments using complicated notation. This is a problem with the entire subject, and it is important to understand the idea of the proof, which is often quite simple. Two particular places that are heavy going are the proof at the end of Chapter 1 that a language recognised by a Turing machine is type 0, and the proof in Chapter 2 that a Turing machine computable function is partial recursive. show less»