Combining concepts of mathematics and computer science, this book is about the sequences of symbols that can be generated by simple models of computation called "finite automata." Suitable for graduate students or advanced undergraduates, it starts from elementary principles and develops the basic theory. The study then progresses to show how these ideas can be applied to solve problems in number theory and physics.

Intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in computer science, A Second Course in Formal Languages and Automata Theory treats topics in the theory of computation not usually covered in a first course. After a review of basic concepts, the book covers combinatorics on words, regular languages, context-free languages, parsing and recognition, Turing machines, and other language classes. Many topics often absent from other textbooks, such as repetitions in words, state complexity, the interchange lemma, 2DPDAs, and the incompressibility method, are covered here. The author...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems, DCFS 2015, held in Waterloo, ON, Canada, in June 2015. The 23 full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The subject of the workshop was descriptional complexity. Roughly speaking, this field is concerned with the size of objects in various mathematical models of computation, such as finite automata, pushdown automata, and Turing machines. Descriptional complexity serves as a theoretical...

his book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems, DCFS 2016, held in Bucharest, Romania, in July 2016. The 13 full papers presented together with 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions.Descriptional Complexity is a field in Computer Science that deals with the size of all kind of objects that occur in computational models, such as Turing Machines, finte automata, grammars, splicing systems and others. The topics of this conference are related to all aspects of...