Course Topics

-- Subject to change without notice --

• Introduction.
  • Warp-speed review of induction.
  • Alphabets, strings, languages.
• Finite Automata.
  • Deterministic Finite Automata.
  • Nondeterministic Finite Automata.
  • Regular expressions.
  • Showing that a language is not regular.
• Context-Free Languages.
  • Context-Free Grammars.
  • Pushdown Automata.
  • Showing that a language is not context free.
  • Parsing (not in text).
• Turing machines and computability theory.
  • Turing machines.
  • Basic undecidability (halting problem).
  • More undecidability: Reductions.
  • Rice's Theorem.
• Introduction to complexity theory: P and NP.