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Primitive recursion and transducers

11/23/2009 please see the updated version: here. Yet another version of the recursion/transducer paper . The main result is that simultaneous primitive recursion on strings corresponds to general products of state machines. Primitive recursion on strings is analogous to primitive

IEEE’s war on science

I dropped my subscription to the IEEE “Digital Library” because I found that if I strayed from a very narrow range ofÂ areas, the IEEE wanted ridiculous fees for access to papers. For example, despite a subscription to the digital

Mathematics education needs probability and art

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMKmovNjvc&w=427&h=352] I agree with this but really, basic ideas of calc are simple and could be taught easily early on too. Found here. But this paper is also good and even though I don’t agree with it 100%, I think

Process algebra (updated)

The first part of a critique of process algebra is below.Â This relates to the Recursion and State paper and explicatory blog entry where I show how to compose classical automata and define them “abstractly” and to a complaint about

OS design

Working on a “process algebra” post, I had to look up previous posts on microkernels where I wrote this: Information hiding is only good design when the hidden information is not needed by the software it is hidden from! If

Robin Milner and Automata theory

I always had the impression that the entire group of “process algebra” people didn’t know much about automata, but this is surprising. But meanwhile I got somehow interested, and I don’t know how, in concurrency. I remember that, without linking

Recursion and state

Despite some deep results, algebraic automata theory has fallen out of favor in theoretical computer science. Reasons include the disciplines failings such as a love of over-generality, weak mathematical background of people working on “formal methods”, and gap between theoreticians

keeping simple