Felipe Cucker

Michael Shub

Lenore Blum

Steve Smale

The classical theory of computation has its origins in the work of Goedel, Turing, Church, and Kleene and has been an extraordinarily successful framework for theoretical computer science. The thesis of this book, however, is that it provides an inadequate foundation for modern scientific computation where most of the algorithms are real number algorithms. The goal of this book is to develop a formal theory of computation which integrates major themes of the classical theory and which is more directly applicable to problems in mathematics, numerical analysis, and scientific computing. Along the way, the authors consider such fundamental problems as: * Is the Mandelbrot set decidable? * For simple quadratic maps, is the Julia set a halting set? * What is the real complexity of Newton's method? * Is there an algorithm for deciding the knapsack problem in a ploynomial number of steps? * Is the Hilbert Nullstellensatz intractable? * Is the problem of locating a real zero of a degree four polynomial intractable? * Is linear programming tractable over the reals? The book is divided into three parts: The first part provides an extensive introduction and then proves the fundamental NP-completeness theorems of Cook-Karp and their extensions to more general number fields as the real and complex numbers. The later parts of the book develop a formal theory of computation which integrates major themes of the classical theory and which is more directly applicable to problems in mathematics, numerical analysis, and scientific computing.

Complexity and Real Computation

Jerrold E. Marsden

Morris W. Hirsch

An extraordinary mathematical conference was held 5-9 August 1990 at the University of California at Berkeley: From Topology to Computation: Unity and Diversity in the Mathematical Sciences An International Research Conference in Honor of Stephen Smale's 60th Birthday The topics of the conference were some of the fields in which Smale has worked: • Differential Topology • Mathematical Economics • Dynamical Systems • Theory of Computation • Nonlinear Functional Analysis • Physical and Biological Applications This book comprises the proceedings of that conference. The goal of the conference was to gather in a single meeting mathemati cians working in the many fields to which Smale has made lasting con tributions. The theme "Unity and Diversity" is enlarged upon in the section entitled "Research Themes and Conference Schedule." The organizers hoped that illuminating connections between seemingly separate mathematical sub jects would emerge from the conference. Since such connections are not easily made in formal mathematical papers, the conference included discussions after each of the historical reviews of Smale's work in different fields. In addition, there was a final panel discussion at the end of the conference.

Michael Shub

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