A reference book discussing applications of formal language theory to group theory, particularly geometric and computational group theory.

This reference discusses how automata and language theory can be used to understand solutions to solving equations in groups and word problems in groups. Examples presented include, how Fine scale complexity theory has entered group theory via these connections and how cellular automata, has been generalized into a group theoretic setting. Chapters written by experts in group theory and computer science explain these connections.

This book is based on notes for a master’s course given at Queen Mary, University of London, in the 1998/9 session. Such courses in London are quite short, and the course consisted essentially of the material in the ?rst three chapters, together with a two-hour lecture on connections with group theory. Chapter 5 is a considerably expanded version of this. For the course, the main sources were the books by Hopcroft and Ullman ([20]), by Cohen ([4]), and by Epstein et al. ([7]). Some use was also made of a later book by Hopcroft and Ullman ([21]). The ulterior motive in the ?rst three chapters is to give a rigorous proof that various notions of recursively enumerable language are equivalent. Three such notions are considered. These are: generated by a type 0 grammar, recognised by a Turing machine (deterministic or not) and de?ned by means of a Godel ̈ numbering, having de?ned “recursively enumerable” for sets of natural numbers. It is hoped that this has been achieved without too many ar- ments using complicated notation. This is a problem with the entire subject, and it is important to understand the idea of the proof, which is often quite simple. Two particular places that are heavy going are the proof at the end of Chapter 1 that a language recognised by a Turing machine is type 0, and the proof in Chapter 2 that a Turing machine computable function is partial recursive.

Since the pioneering works of Novikov and Maltsev, group theory has been a testing ground for mathematical logic in its many manifestations, from the theory of algorithms to model theory. The interaction between logic and group theory led to many prominent results which enriched both disciplines. This volume reflects the major themes of the American Mathematical Society/Association for Symbolic Logic Joint Special Session (Baltimore, MD), Interactions between Logic, Group Theory and Computer Science. Included are papers devoted to the development of techniques used for the interaction of group theory and logic. It is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in algorithmic and combinatorial group theory. A complement to this work is Volume 349 in the AMS series, Contemporary Mathematics, Computational and Experimental Group Theory, which arose from the same meeting and concentrates on the interaction of group theory and computer science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2012, held in A Coruña, Spain in March 2012. The 41 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks and 2 invited tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 114 initial submissions. The volume features contributions from both classical theory fields and application areas; e.g. innformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial intelligence, etc. Among the topics covered are algebraic language theory, automata and logic, systems analysis, systems verifications, computational complexity, decidability, unification, graph transformations, language-based cryptography, and applications in data mining, computational learning, and pattern recognition.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2019, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in March 2019. The 31 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 98 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: Automata; Complexity; Grammars; Languages; Graphs, trees and rewriting; and Words and codes.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2018, held in Ramat Gan, Israel, in April 2018.The 20 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers cover fields like algebraic language theory, algorithms for semi-structured data mining, algorithms on automata and words, automata and logic, automata for system analysis and programme verification, automata networks, automatic structures, codes, combinatorics on words, computational complexity, concurrency and Petri nets, data and image compression, descriptional complexity, foundations of finite state technology, foundations of XML, grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, unification, categorial, etc.), grammatical inference and algorithmic learning, graphs and graph transformation, language varieties and semigroups, language-based cryptography, mathematical and logical foundations of programming methodologies, parallel and regulated rewriting, parsing, patterns, power series, string processing algorithms, symbolic dynamics, term rewriting, transducers, trees, tree languages and tree automata, and weighted automata.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2021, held in Milan, Italy, in March 2021. The 26 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: algebraic structures; automata; complexity; learning; logics and languages; trees and graphs; and words and strings.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 94), held at Jerusalem in July 1994. ICALP is an annual conference sponsored by the European Association on Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). The proceedings contains 48 refereed papers selected from 154 submissions and 4 invited papers. The papers cover the whole range of theoretical computer science; they are organized in sections on theory of computation, automata and computation models, expressive power, automata and concurrency, pattern matching, data structures, computational complexity, logic and verification, formal languages, term rewriting, algorithms and communications, graph algorithms, randomized complexity, various algorithms.

This volume contains the proceedings of the AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference on Geometric Group Theory and Computer Science held at Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA). The conference was devoted to computational aspects of geometric group theory, a relatively young area of research which has grown out of an influx of ideas from topology and computer science into combinatorial group theory. The book reflects recent progress in this interesting new field. Included are articles about insights from computer experiments, applications of formal language theory, decision problems, and complexity problems. There is also a survey of open questions in combinatorial group theory. The volume will interest group theorists, topologists, and experts in automata and language theory.