Harvard University
Computer Science 121 and CSCI E-207

Introduction to Formal Systems and Computation

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Lecture Listing

Sept. 3: Introduction and Overview (slides)
Sept. 8: Mathematical Preliminaries: Sets, relations, strings, languages (slides)
Sept. 10: Doing proofs, using LaTeX (slides)
Sept. 15: Finite Automata (slides)
Sept. 17: Nondeterministic Finite Automata, Closure Properties (slides)
Sept. 22: Regular Expressions (slides)
Sept 24: Countability and Diagonalization (slides)
Sept 29: Nonregular languages (slides)
Oct. 1 : Context-Free Grammars (slides)
Oct. 6: Pushdown Automata (slides)
Oct. 8: Closure Properties of Context-Free Languages, Non-Context-Free Languages (slides)
Oct. 13: General Context-Free Recognition (slides)
Oct. 15: Turing Machines and Simulations (slides)
Oct. 22: Church's Thesis (slides)
Oct. 27: Decidability, Universal Turing Machines (slides)
Oct. 29: Decidability, Universal Turing Machines II (slides)
Nov. 3: Unecidability (slides)
Nov. 5: Reductions and Rice's Theorem (slides)
Nov. 10: Undecidable Problems and Unprovable Theorems (slides)
Nov. 12 : Undecidability, Unprovabiliity, Complexity (slides)
Nov. 17: Polynomial Time (slides)
Nov. 19: NP (slides)
Nov. 24:NP-Completeness (slides)
Nov. 26: THANKSGIVING
Dec. 1:Cook-Levin Theorem and Beyond
Dec. 3: Additional Topics and Conclusions