Decision problems for linear recurrence sequences

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• James Worrell, University of Oxford
• Friday 01 February 2013, 16:00-17:00
• UG05 Learning Centre.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Paul Levy.

Linear recurrence sequences are ubiquitous in discrete mathematics and appear in diverse areas of computer science, including term rewriting, probabilistic verification, and termination analysis for while loops. In this talk we consider three fundamental decision problems associated with linear recurrence sequences: the Skolem problem (is the sequence ever zero), the positivity problem (is the sequence always positive) and the ultimate positivity problem (is the sequence ultimately positive). We describe what is known about these problems, including some new decidability and hardness results for the positivity and ultimate positivity problems.

This talk is part of the Theoretical computer science seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Computer Science Departmental Series
• Computer Science Distinguished Seminars
• Theoretical computer science seminar
• UG05 Learning Centre
• computer sience

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