The course will cover the important formal languages in the Chomsky hierarchy -- the regular sets, the context-free languages, and the recursively enumerable sets -- as well as the formalisms that generate these languages and the machines that recognize them. The course will introduce the basic concepts of computability and complexity theory by focusing on the question, "What are the fundamental capabilities and limitations of computers?" The course will also introduce probably approximately correct learning, the model of computation underlying machine learning, and the untyped lambda calculus, the model of computation underlying functional programming languages.

The concepts covered in this course will be amply illustrated by applications to current programming languages, algorithms, natural language processing, and hardware and software design. The topics covered in Computer Science Theory are required background to many Computer Science upper division courses in programming languages, compilers, natural language processing, computer hardware and logic design, analysis of algorithms, computational complexity, learning theory, and cryptography.