This festschrift volume in honour of Donald B McAlister on the occasion of his 65th birthday presents papers from leading researchers in semigroups and formal languages. The contributors cover a number of areas of current interest: from pseudovarieties and regular languages to ordered groupoids and one-relator groups, and from semigroup algebras to presentations of monoids and transformation semigroups. The papers are accessible to graduate students as well as researchers seeking new directions for future work.

This festschrift volume in honour of Donald B McAlister on the occasion of his 65th birthday presents papers from leading researchers in semigroups and formal languages. The contributors cover a number of areas of current interest: from pseudovarieties and regular languages to ordered groupoids and one-relator groups, and from semigroup algebras to presentations of monoids and transformation semigroups. The papers are accessible to graduate students as well as researchers seeking new directions for future work.

This festschrift volume in honour of Donald B McAlister on the occasion of his 65th birthday presents papers from leading researchers in semigroups and formal languages. The contributors cover a number of areas of current interest: from pseudovarieties and regular languages to ordered groupoids and one-relator groups, and from semigroup algebras to presentations of monoids and transformation semigroups. The papers are accessible to graduate students as well as researchers seeking new directions for future work.

This is a rigorous and self-contained monograph on a central topic in theoretical computer science. For the first time in book form, original results from the last ten years are presented, some previously unpublished, using combinatorial and algebraic methods. These are mainly based on combinatorics on words and especially on the theory of "unavoidable regularities." Researchers will find important new results on semigroups and formal languages, as well as various applications for these methods.

The proceedings present some new topics and techniques of semigroup theory. Papers by leading experts in this theory are collected. Since results on semigroups have naturally been employed in formal languages and codes, the focus is also on these directions.

This uniquely authoritative and comprehensive handbook is the first work to cover the vast field of formal languages, as well as their applications to the divergent areas of linguistics, dvelopmental biology, computer graphics, cryptology, molecular genetics, and programming languages. The work has been divided into three volumes.

This book describes the relation between profinite semigroups and symbolic dynamics. Profinite semigroups are topological semigroups which are compact and residually finite. In particular, free profinite semigroups can be seen as the completion of free semigroups with respect to the profinite metric. In this metric, two words are close if one needs a morphism on a large finite monoid to distinguish them. The main focus is on a natural correspondence between minimal shift spaces (closed shift-invariant sets of two-sided infinite words) and maximal J-classes (certain subsets of free profinite semigroups). This correspondence sheds light on many aspects of both profinite semigroups and symbolic dynamics. For example, the return words to a given word in a shift space can be related to the generators of the group of the corresponding J-class. The book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in mathematics or theoretical computer science.

The thematic term on OC Semigroups, Algorithms, Automata and LanguagesOCO organized at the International Centre of Mathematics (Coimbra, Portugal) in MayOCoJuly 2001 was the gathering point for researchers working in the field of semigroups, algorithms, automata and languages. These areas were selected considering their huge recent developments, their potential applications, and the motivation from other fields of mathematics and computer science. This proceedings volume is a unique collection of advanced courses and original contributions on semigroups and their connections with logic, automata, languages, group theory, discrete dynamics, topology and complexity. A selection of open problems discussed during the thematic term is also included. Contents: Finite Semigroups: An Introduction to a Unified Theory of Pseudovarieties (J Almeida); On Existence Varieties of Regular Semigroups (K Auinger); Varieties of Languages (M J J Branco); A Short Introduction to Automatic Group Theory (C Choffrut); Some Results on Semigroup-Graded Rings (W D Munn); Profinite Groups and Applications to Finite Semigroups (L Ribes); Dynamics of Finite Semigroups (J Almeida); Finite Semigroups Imposing Tractable Constraints (A Bulatov et al.); On the Efficiency and Deficiency of Rees Matrix Semigroups (C M Campbell et al.); Some Pseudovariety Joins Involving Groups and Locally Trivial Semigroups (J C Costa); Partial Action of Groups on Relational Structures: A Connection Between Model Theory and Profinite Topology (T Coulbois); Some Relatives of Automatic and Hyperbolic Groups (M Hoffmann et al.); A Sampler of a Topological Approach to Inverse Semigroups (B Steinberg); Finite Semigroups and the Logical Description of Regular Languages (H Straubing); Diamonds are Forever: The Variety DA (P Tesson & D Th(r)rien); Decidability Problems in Finite Semigroups (P G Trotter); and other papers. Readership: Researchers, academics and graduate students in pure mathematics and computer science."

The conference was a rare occasion for different schools and perspectives to meet in a single event, bringing together researchers interested in semigroups, automata and languages. The proceedings contain both surveys and research reports, which have been carefully refereed. They should be of value to both mathematicians and computer scientists.