Fall 98, CSE 468:
Lecture 1 (Aug 26)
- Overview of Syllabus.
Prerequisites: The official prerequisite is to have followed
a course in discrete mathematics (such as CSE 260 or MATH 311).
However, what is really important, is to have an attitude for
mathematical and logical reasoning, and for theory in general.
I know that some of you come from different schools and
might not have followed a course covering the same topics
as CSE 260 / MATH 311. For this reason, and for the
general benefit, I will use the first lectures to recall
all the basic mathematical notions that we will use in
this course.
- Contents of the course.
The main questions we will investigate in this course:
- Authomata Theory and Languages:
Are all the languages equivalent (from the
point of view of recognition/parsing)
or can we extablish a hierarchy?
What kind of machines (automata) do we need
to recognize them?
- Computability:
Is there a limit to the computing power of machines?
(Computing power = class of functions computed)
- Preliminary notions: Basic mathematical definitions.
- Sets and operations on sets
(intersection, union, difference, complementation).
Algebraic laws (commutativity, associativity, distributivity etc.).
Venn diagrams.