CS 301: Languages and Automata

Week 1

Tue, Aug. 25

Introduction
Reading: Sipser 0, Hammack 1 & 2

Thu, Aug. 27

Deterministic finite automata I
Reading: Sipser 1.1

Week 2

Tue, Sep. 01

Deterministic finite automata II
No reading.

Thu, Sep. 03

Nondeterministic finite automata
Reading: Sipser 1.2
Exercises 1 due

Week 3

Tue, Sep. 08

Regular languages and their closure properties I
Reading: Hammack 4

Thu, Sep. 10

Regular languages and their closure properties II
No reading.

Week 4

Tue, Sep. 15

Regular expressions I
Reading: Sipser 1.3
Exercises 2 due

Thu, Sep. 17

Regular expressions II
Reading: Hammack 5

Week 5

Tue, Sep. 22

Nonregular languages and the pumping lemma
Reading: Sipser 1.4
Problem set 1 due

Thu, Sep. 24

Proving that a language is nonregular
Reading: Hammack 6

Week 6

Tue, Sep. 29

Exam 1
No reading.

Thu, Oct. 01

Context-free grammars I
Reading: Sipser 2.1

Week 7

Tue, Oct. 06

Context-free grammars II
No reading.

Thu, Oct. 08

Push-down automata I
Reading: Sipser 2.2

Week 8

Tue, Oct. 13

Push-down automata II
No reading.

Thu, Oct. 15

Equivalence of CFGs and PDAs
No reading.

Week 9

Tue, Oct. 20

Context-free languages and their closure properties
Reading: intersection of CF and regular languages

Thu, Oct. 22

Non–context-free languages
Reading: Sipser 2.3

Week 10

Tue, Oct. 27

Exam 2
No reading.

Thu, Oct. 29

Turing machines; languages and input encoding
Reading: Sipser 3.1

Week 11

Tue, Nov. 03

Turing machine variants and the Church-Turing thesis
Reading: Sipser 3.2 and 3.3

Thu, Nov. 05

Decidable languages
Reading: Sipser 4.1

Week 12

Tue, Nov. 10

Decidable languages
Reading: Sipser 4.1

Thu, Nov. 12

Diagonalization and the halting problem
Reading: Sipser 4.2

Week 13

Tue, Nov. 17

Undecidable languages
No reading.

Thu, Nov. 19

Reductions
Reading: Sipser 5.1

Week 14

Tue, Nov. 24

Mapping reductions
Reading: Sipser 5.3

Thu, Nov. 26

No class: Thanksgiving
Reading: None

Week 15

Tue, Dec. 01

TBD
Reading: TBD

Thu, Dec. 03

TBD
Reading: TBD

Wed, Dec. 09

Final Exam