Cordelia Hall – författare

Several areas of mathematics find application throughout computer science, and all students of computer science need a practical working understanding of them. These core subjects are centred on logic, sets, recursion, induction, relations and functions. The material is often called discrete mathematics, to distinguish it from the traditional topics of continuous mathematics such as integration and differential equations. The central theme of this book is the connection between computing and discrete mathematics. This connection is useful in both directions: • Mathematics is used in many branches of computer science, in applica­ tions including program specification, datastructures,design and analysis of algorithms, database systems, hardware design, reasoning about the correctness of implementations, and much more; • Computers can help to make the mathematics easier to learn and use, by making mathematical terms executable, making abstract concepts more concrete, and through the use of software tools such as proof checkers. These connections are emphasised throughout the book. Software tools (see Appendix A) enable the computer to serve as a calculator, but instead of just doing arithmetic and trigonometric functions, it will be used to calculate with sets, relations, functions, predicates and inferences. There are also special software tools, for example a proof checker for logical proofs using natural deduction.

Computer science abounds with applications of discrete mathematics, yet s- dents of computer science often study discrete mathematics in the context of purely mathematical applications. They have to ?gure out for themselves how to apply the ideas of discrete mathematics to computing problems. It is not easy. Most students fail to experience broad success in this enterprise, which is not surprising, since many of the most important advances in science and engineeringhavebeen, precisely, applicationsofmathematicstospeci?cscience and engineering problems. Tobesure,mostdiscretemathtextbooksincorporatesomeaspectsapplying discrete math to computing, but it usually takes the form of asking students to write programs to compute the number of three-ball combinations there are in a set of ten balls or, at best, to implement a graph algorithm. Few texts ask students to use mathematical logic to analyze properties of digital circuits or computer programs or to apply the set theoretic model of functions to understand higher-order operations. A major aim of this text is to integrate, tightly, the study of discrete mathematics with the study of central problems of computer science.