Brent Heeringa
Office: Thompson Chemistry Laboratory 309
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays 11.00-12.00
(and whenever the
door is open or you happen to run into me at Cold Spring Coffee
Roasters)
Phone: 413.597.4711
Course Description: From the catalog:
Formal models of computation such as finite state
automata, recursive functions, formal grammars and Turing machines
will be studied. These models will be used to provide a mathematical
basis for the study of computability. Applications to compiler design
and computational undecidability will also be covered.
We all have problems. Some problems are easier to solve than
others; some are unsolvable. But what is a problem? And what is a
solution? We'll formalize these nebulous ideas using language
theory. We'll treat problems as languages and solutions as descriptions
of models that accept strings in those language.
The models we study are easy to describe (think flow charts for
toasters and elevators), yet computationally very powerful (we can,
for example, use them to find the minimal mileage route for the
Williamstown snowplow fleet). The rewarding part is understanding the
limitations and expressiveness of each model.
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Announcements:
- [ 18.53 - 11 December 2003] Clarifications on the final.
- [24.00 - 05 Decmeber 2003] Homework 11 Solutions are now available.
- [23.47 - 3 Decmeber 2003] Homework 10 Solutions are now available.
- [13.18 - 24 November 2003] Bonus Homework 11 is available.
- [13.56 - 19 November 2003] Homework 9 Solutions are now avaialble.
- [12.05 - 10 November 2003] Homework 9 is now avavailable.
- [12.05 - 10 November 2003] Homework 8 Solutions are now avaialble.
- [21.49 - 31 October 2003] Style Day pictures are now available (thanks to Masha).
- [10.01 - 28 October 2003] Homework 6 solutions are now posted.
- [14.21 - 27 October 2003] homework 7 is now available.
- [16.02 - 15 October 2003] I wrote up a number of non-regular proofs that use the pumping lemma and Myhill-Nerode -- additionally, I show how to enumerate all the equivalence classses for a certain non-regular language.
- [11.19 - 15 October 2003] homework 5 solutions are now available.
- [12.03 - 6 October 2003] homework 4 solutions are now available. Homework 5 is also available.
- [11.27 - 22 September 2003] homework 2 solutions. I updated them at 11.27 because I mislabelled a transition in Question 3. It is now fixed -- update, I had it right the first time -- so I changed it back. Sorry for the inconvenience.
- [23.51 - 14 September 2003] homework 2
is available. There are a number of difficult problems so please, start early.
- [14.06 - 10 September 2003] I added some
additional points of interest on the grading page.
-
[09.05 - 9 September 2003] Kai Chen, our wonderful
teaching assistant, will hold office hours in the Unix Lab on Thursday
evenings from 21.30 to 23.30.
-
[09.31 - 5 September 2003] homework 0
and homework 1 are available.