Third Edition
Born in the latter part of the 20th century from the marriage of mathematics and technology, the theory of computation is now a major discipline permeating science and society. Michael Sipser's popular text gives a broad overview of this fascinating subject, starting from basic principles and covering many beautiful results and exciting unsolved questions. Sipser's approachable style allows students at every level to understand and enjoy this field. His innovative "proof idea" sections reveal the intuition underpinning the formal proofs of theorems by explaining profound concepts in plain English.
The third edition includes an entirely new section on deterministic context-free languages with connections to parsing and LR(k) grammars. This lucid treatment of complex material illustrates how theoretical insights yield important applications in compiler design. In addition, the new edition incorporates many improvements that readers have suggested and offers updated problem sets and solutions.
Michael Sipser has taught theoretical computer science and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the past 32 years. He is a Professor of Applied Mathematics, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the current head of the mathematics department. He enjoys teaching and pondering the many mysteries of complexity theory.