The aim of this monograph is to give a self-contained introduction to the modern theory of finite transformation semigroups with a strong emphasis on concrete examples and combinatorial applications. It covers the following topics on the examples of the three classical finite transformation semigroups: transformations and semigroups, ideals and Green's relations, subsemigroups, congruences, endomorphisms, nilpotent subsemigroups, presentations, actions on sets, linear representations, cross-sections and variants. The book contains many exercises and historical comments and is directed first of all to both graduate and postgraduate students looking for an introduction to the theory of transformation semigroups, but also to tutors and researchers.

Certain properties that are common to all finite transformation semigroups are discussed. For example special properties of ideals in transformation semigroups are established. It is also proved that every element of a finite transformation semigroup must be one-to-one from some maximal subset of its domain onto that same set. This maximal subset is decomposed into cycles, and results are obtained connecting the orders of the cycles of an element and the order of the monogenic semigroup generated by that element. Numerical results concerning arbitrary subsemigroups in the transformation semigroup on three elements are listed. (Author).

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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Workshop of Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems, DCFS 2013, held in London, ON, Canada, in July 2013. The 22 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The topics covered are automata, grammars, languages and other formal systems; various modes of operations and complexity measures; co-operating systems; succinctness of description of objects, state-explosion-like phenomena; circuit complexity of Boolean functions and related measures; size complexity and structural complexity of formal systems; trade-offs between computational models and mode of operation; applications of formal systems; for instance in software and hardware testing, in dialogue systems, in systems modeling or in modeling natural languages; and their complexity constraints; size or structural complexity of formal systems for modeling natural languages; complexity aspects related to the combinatorics of words; descriptional complexity in resource-bounded or structure-bounded environments; structural complexity as related to descriptional complexity; frontiers between decidability and undecidability; universality and reversibility; nature-motivated (bio-inspired) architectures and unconventional models of computing; Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity, algorithmic information.

This book contains a collection of fifteen articles and is dedicated to the sixtieth birthdays of Lex Renner and Mohan Putcha, the pioneers of the field of algebraic monoids. Topics presented include: structure and representation theory of reductive algebraic monoids monoid schemes and applications of monoids monoids related to Lie theory equivariant embeddings of algebraic groups constructions and properties of monoids from algebraic combinatorics endomorphism monoids induced from vector bundles Hodge–Newton decompositions of reductive monoids A portion of these articles are designed to serve as a self-contained introduction to these topics, while the remaining contributions are research articles containing previously unpublished results, which are sure to become very influential for future work. Among these, for example, the important recent work of Michel Brion and Lex Renner showing that the algebraic semi groups are strongly π-regular. Graduate students as well as researchers working in the fields of algebraic (semi)group theory, algebraic combinatorics and the theory of algebraic group embeddings will benefit from this unique and broad compilation of some fundamental results in (semi)group theory, algebraic group embeddings and algebraic combinatorics merged under the umbrella of algebraic monoids.

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 22nd IFIP WG 1.5International Workshop on Cellular Automata and Discrete ComplexSystems, AUTOMATA 2016, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in June 2016. This volume contains 3 invited talks in full-paper length and 12 regularpapers, which were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 23submissions. The papers feature research on all fundamental aspects of cellular automata and related discrete complex systems and deal with the following topics: dynamical, topological, ergodic and algebraic aspects; algorithmic and complexity issues; emergent properties; formal language processing; symbolic dynamics; models of parallelism and distributed systems; timing schemes; phenomenological descriptions; scientific modeling; and practical applications.

This book offers an original account of the theory of near-rings, with a considerable amount of material which has not previously been available in book form, some of it completely new. The book begins with an introduction to the subject and goes on to consider the theory of near-fields, transformation near-rings and near-rings hosted by a group. The bulk of the chapter on near-fields has not previously been available in English. The transformation near-rings chapters considerably augment existing knowledge and the chapters on product hosting are essentially new. Other chapters contain original material on new classes of near-rings and non-abelian group cohomology. The Theory of Near-Rings will be of interest to researchers in the subject and, more broadly, ring and representation theorists. The presentation is elementary and self-contained, with the necessary background in group and ring theory available in standard references.

The complex information systems which have evolved in recent decades rely on robust and coherent representations in order to function. Such representations and associated reasoning techniques constitute the modern discipline of formal ontology, which is now applied to fields such as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the semantic web. Ontologies are increasingly employed in a number of complex real-world application domains. For instance, in biology and medicine, more and more principle-based ontologies are being developed for the description of biological and biomedical phenomena. To be effective, such ontologies must work well together, and as they become more widely used, achieving coordinated development presents a significant challenge. This book presents collected articles from the 7th International Conference on Formal Ontologies (FOIS), held in Graz, Austria, in July 2012.FOIS is a forum which brings together representatives of all major communities involved in the development and application of ontologies to explore both theoretical issues and concrete applications in the field. The book is organized in eight sections, each of which deals with the ontological aspects of: bioinformatics; physical entities; artifacts and human resources; ontology evaluation; language and social relations; time and events; representation and the methodological aspects of ontological engineering. Providing a current overview of developments in formal ontology, this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the application of ontologies, and to anybody wishing to keep abreast of advances in the field.