Important announcement

Dear visitor,

Please note that this OpenCourseWare platform will be replaced at the end of 2026 by a new platform (under the same url ocw.tudelft.nl).

Courses and their contents that are currently available the platform will partly be migrated. URL’s for this content will change and content might be unavailable for some time. In addition, some courses will not be available anymore.

If you are linking to specific courses on this platform (for instance for your students), please take timely measures to avoid problems with access. Possible actions are:

  • Download the materials to your local platform (laptop, server)
  • For educators only (including TU Delft lecturers): Contact us at ocw@tudelft.nl and inform us what course you are using in what context (institute, program, period of use, number of students). We will research (in collaboration with the authors of the course) and decide if we will migrate the course, and if yes, can supply you with a new url.

Thank you.

Home Courses Theory of Computation

Overview

Computability Theory deals with one of the most fundamental questions in computer science:

What is computing and what are the limits of what a computer can compute?

Or, formulated differently: “What kind of problems can be algorithmically solved?” During the course this question will be studied. Firstly, the notion of algorithm or computing will be made precise by using the mathematical model of a Turing machine. Secondly, it will be shown that basic issues in computer science, like “Given a program P does it halt for any input x?” or “Given two program P and Q, are they equivalent?” cannot be solved by any Turing machine. This shows that there exist problems that are impossible to solve with a computer, the so-called “undecidable problems”.

The book is in English, the recorded lectures and slides however, are in Dutch

Creative Commons License
Theory of Computation by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/theory-of-computation/.
Back to top
[sg_popup id=6]