Abstract
The goal of this book is to bring to light certain computational phenomena. The features we are interested in pertain to computation and not just some particular paradigm of computation such as programming in C++ on a workstation running UNIX. As a consequence, the conclusions we reach about computation will be valid for today’s computing systems and the computing systems of the future. In gaining such generality, we lose immediate applicability of the results studied to contemporary computing practices. The main intellectual benefit to students in this course is a broadened intuition about computation. It is assumed that the reader has ample experience programming in more than one programming language. This book will make you think about computing in a new light. Some of your current intuitions about computation will be challenged. This challenge comes not from radical ideas, but rather from fundamental facts concerning computation. What is presented below is not speculation, every claim is proven using sufficiently rigorous mathematics. Consequently, the reader should have a firm background in discrete mathematics. A course in automata theory is also desirable as a prerequisite.
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Smith, C.H. (1994). Introduction. In: A Recursive Introduction to the Theory of Computation. Graduate Texts in Computer Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8501-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8501-9_1
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-6420-0
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