For almost a decade, I taught the theory of formal languages and computation at the University of Missouri—Columbia in the United States back in the 1990’s, and since 2000, I have taught this subject at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic. The lecture notes I wrote at these two universities underlie this book, and I have greatly benefited from conversations with many colleagues and students there. In addition, this book is based on notes I have used for my talks at various American, Asian, and European universities over the past three decades. Notes made at the Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan were particularly helpful.
Writing this book was supported by the European Regional Development Fund in the IT4Innovations Centre of Excellence project (CZ.1.05/1.1.00/02.0070). This work was also supported by Visual Computing Competence Center (TE01020415).
My thanks go to Martin Čermák and Jiří Techet for their comments on a draft of this text. Without the great collaboration, encouragement and friendship with Zbyněk Křivka, I would hardly start writing this book, let alone complete it. I am also grateful to John Wyzalek at Taylor and Francis for an excellent editorial work. Finally, I thank my wife Ivana for her patience and, most importantly, love.