Set theory, logic, discrete mathematics, and fundamental algorithms (along with their correctness and complexity analysis) will always remain useful for computing professionals and need to be understood by students who want to succeed. This textbook explains a number of those fundamental algorithms to programming students in a concise, yet precise, manner. The book includes the background material needed to understand the explanations and to develop such explanations for other algorithms. The author demonstrates that clarity and simplicity are achieved not by avoiding formalism, but by using...

This book discusses two questions in Complexity Theory: the Monotonicity Testing problem and the 2-to-2 Games Conjecture.Monotonicity testing is a problem from the field of property testing, first considered by Goldreich et al. in 2000. The input of the algorithm is a function, and the goal is to design a tester that makes as few queries to the function as possible, accepts monotone functions and rejects far-from monotone functions with a probability close to 1. The first result of this book is an essentially optimal algorithm for this problem. The analysis of the algorithm heavily relies on...

When electronic digital computers first appeared after World War II, they appeared as a revolutionary force. Business management, the world of work, administrative life, the nation state, and soon enough everyday life were expected to change dramatically with these machines' use. Ever since, diverse prophecies of computing have continually emerged, through to the present day.As computing spread beyond the US and UK, such prophecies emerged from strikingly different economic, political, and cultural conditions. This volume explores how these expectations differed, assesses unexpected...