Computer science, before it had departments: a 1962 symposium on automata
This 1963 proceedings volume records early research into mathematical automata, formal languages, recursion and the limits of computation, presented at a New York symposium in April 1962.
The story
The automata of the title are not clockwork toys but abstract machines, devices that exist only on paper and are studied with the tools of mathematics. In April 1962 researchers met in New York to present work on what such machines can and cannot do: which problems can be settled by a mechanical procedure, what can be computed at all, how a definition can be made to refer back to itself, and how formal languages are built.
The papers came out in 1963, edited by Jerome Fox, from the Polytechnic Press of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, as volume XII in the Microwave Research Institute’s series of symposia. The questions they treat went on to sit at the centre of theoretical computer science and of language processing, and the diagrams and formal proofs show that field while it was still young.
This copy is the original hardbound volume, in gray publisher’s cloth with a little surface soil, scattered spots and mild wear at the edges. The spine printing is intact and the binding appears strong.
Details
- Date
- 1963
- Publisher
- Polytechnic Press, New York
- Edition
- Microwave Research Institute Symposia Series, Volume XII
- Binding
- cloth
- Condition
- Gray publisher cloth with slight surface soil, scattered spots and mild edge wear. Spine printing intact and apparent strong binding. No named inscription seen in photographed leaves.