Week 1

• Meeting 1: Introduction to the course. Finite automata: examples and definition. Pages 31--40 from Chapter 1 of text.
• Meeting 2: The process of designing finite automata. Operations on Languages. Closure under the union operation. Pages 39--47 from Chapter 1 of text.

Week 2

• Meeting 1: Regular languages are closed under union and intersection. Closure under concatenation? Introduction to Nondeterministic Finite Automata (NFA). Pages 45--51 from Chapter 1 of text.
• Meeting 2: More NFA examples. Formal definition of NFA. Equivalence of NFAs and DFAs. Pages 51--58.

Week 3

• Meeting 1: Equivalence of NFAs and DFAs. Closure of regular languages under union, concatenation, and star operations. Pages 54--63.
• Meeting 2: Regular Expressions: Definition and Examples. Pages 63 -- 66.

Week 4

• Meeting 1: A language is regular if and only if some regular expression describes it. Pages 66 -- 76.
• Meeting 2: Completing the above equivalence, and an introduction to nonregular languages and the pumping lemma. Pages 66-78.

Week 5

• Meeting 1: The pumping lemma, and its use in showing that certain languages are nonregular. Pages 77--82.
• Meeting 2: Context-Free Grammars, pages 102--106 of Chapter 2.

Week 6

• Meeting 1: Methods for designing CFGs. Ambiguity. Pages 106--108.
• Meeting 2: Pushdown automata and examples. Pages 111 -- 116.

Week 7

• Meeting 1: Equivalence of PDAs and CFGs, Part I: Converting a CFG into an equivalent PDA. Pages 117--120. Pages 121--124.
• Meeting 2: Midterm 1.

Week 8

• Meeting 1: Equivalence of PDAs and CFGs, Part II: Converting a PDA into an equivalent CFG. Pages 121--124.
• Meeting 2: Languages that are not context free -- Pumping lemma for CFLs. Pages 125--128.

Week 9

• Meeting 1: More examples of languages that are not context free. Proof of the pumping lemma. Pages 125--129.
• Meeting 2: Turing Machines, Formal Definition, Examples. Pages 165--170.

Week 10

• Meeting 1: Turing-decidable and Turing-recognizable languages. Examples of Turing Machine descriptions at implementation level. Robustness. Multi-tape Turing Machines. Pages 169--178.
• Meeting 2: Nondeterministic Turing Machines. Church-Turing Thesis. Encoding graphs, automata, etc. as strings for TM input. Pages 178--187.

Week 11

• Meeting 1: Decidable problems concerning regular languages. Pages 193--197 of Chapter 4.
• Meeting 2: Decidable problems concerning context free languages. Chomsky Nornal Form. Pages 198--200.

Week 12

• Meeting 1: Undecidability. Countability. The set of rationals is countable why the ste of reals isn't. Diagonalization. Pages 201--206.
• Meeting 2: Midterm 2

Week 13

• Meeting 1: Some languages are not Turing-recognizable (Corollary 4.18). The acceptance problem for Turing machines is Turing-recognizable (page 202) but not decidable (page 207).
• Neeting 2: More on the undecidability of A_{TM}. The complement of this language is not Turing recognizable. Pages 207--210.