Math 342: Theory of Computation

Spring 2020

General Information

Instructor: Chris Staecker (Personal Homepage)

Email: cstaecker@fairfield.edu

Office: BNW 16

Office Hours: TF 11-12:30, W 11-1 or by appointment

Class Meetings: TF 12:30-1:20, W 1-1:50, BNW 341

Textbook: Formal Language: A Practical Introduction by Webber

Final Exam: Friday May 1, 11:30AM

Other Stuff

• Syllabus (pdf)
• Links from 3/4:
• Haskell CFG
• Java BNF
• LISP BNF
• LISP code example

Tests & Homework

1/29: Homework #1 due

Chapter 1: 1, 2, 4 ("set former" is like what you see in #1a,b,d,e)
Chapter 2: 2, 3, 4acd, 5ab, 6c, 7, 8, 9ab
Chapter 3: 8, 9, 10
In case you don't have the book yet, here are these pages: Book pages (pdf)
Professor's selected solutions

2/5: Homework #2 due

Chapter 3: 1ab, 4, 5a (In #4b, L is supposed to be L₁)
Professor's selected solutions

2/12: Homework #3 due

Chapter 5: 1, 3acdf, 4ad, 5bd, 7a, 8b, 9b, 10
Chapter 6: 3, 6
Professor's selected solutions

2/14: Exam #1

 

2/19: Homework #4 due

Chapter 7: 1a-s
Professor's selected solutions

2/26: Homework #5 due

Chapter 7: Give a regular expression and an NFA for #1g, Convert the NFAs in #4, 5, 6 to regular expression
Chapter 11: 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 (for all these, use derivatives, not the pumping lemma)
Professor's selected solutions

3/4: Homework #6 due

Chapter 10: 4ad, 5cd, 6, 7b, 10f, 11abe, 13bc
Professor's selected solutions

3/18: Homework #7 due

Chapter 12: 1bcfhjqr, 2efg, 4abc (for c, there are two parse trees for "()()()"), 5b
Professor's selected solutions

Week of 3/17 videos

Stack machines
Stack machines formal description
Stack machines & NFAs & grammars

3/25: Homework #8 due

Chapter 13: 2, 4, 5, 6aceg, 7, 9
Professor's selected solutions

Week of 3/23 videos

Converting stack machines to CFGs
Closure properties for CFLs

3/27: Exam #2

 

Week of 3/30 videos

Pumping parse trees
Non-context free languages
Turing machines intro

Week of 4/6 videos

Turing machines
More Turing machines!
Bonus: Even more TMs! (Zoom session)

4/8: Homework #9 due

Chapter 14: 3, 4, 5, 6
Chapter 16: 1, 3, 4
Professor's selected solutions

Week of 4/13 videos

Turing machine variants
Universal machines
Turing computable functions

4/15: Homework #10 due

Chapter 16: 2, 7, 9, 12 (you can assume n, i, j are all > 0), 13, 14
Professor's selected solutions

4/22: Homework #11 due

Homework #11
Professor's selected solutions

Week of 4/20 videos

The Halting Problem
A non-RE language
The Post Correspondence Problem

Course evaluation

Please do the survey!

4/29: Homework #12 due

Homework #12
Professor's selected solutions

5/1, 11:30AM: Final Exam