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Algebra, meaning, and computation : essays dedicated to Joseph A. Goguen on the occasion of His 65th Birthday (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4060)
Futatsugi K., Jouannaud J., Meseguer J., Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2006. 643 pp. Type: Book (9783540354628)
Date Reviewed: Jan 15 2007

Joseph A. Goguen was a world-class computer scientist whose work centered on the most abstract features of computer science. His central insight was that computer structures were grounded in abstract algebra. His particular interests included category theory, institutions, formal methods, and functional programming languages. He was especially noted for inventing OBJ, a meta-programming language that spawned a family of such languages.

This volume collects all but two of the papers presented at a symposium to honor Goguen, held at the University of San Diego from June 27 through June 29, 2006, which was less than a week before his passing on July 3. It also includes several papers not presented at the symposium. The papers that were part of the symposium are presented in the order delivered at the event so that the reader can experience the intellectual flow of the conference as it was conducted. The audience for these papers is clearly researchers in theoretical computer science and programming languages. Much of the volume will be lost on readers without a background in formal methods, abstract algebra, and semantics.

The bibliography of Goguen’s work that opens the substantive portion of the book reveals his interest in programming languages, hidden algebra, and art; the volume also includes a biographical sketch that captures his intellectual pursuits, including Buddhism. However, a fuller bibliographical piece placing and assessing his work within the broad fields of software engineering and theoretical computer science would have provided a useful overview of his achievements and served to frame the articles in the collection.

The volume is divided into five parts: “Meaning,” “Meta-Logic,” “Specification and Composition,” “Behavior and Formal Languages,” and “Models, Deduction, and Computation.” The division into these categories is revealed in the table of contents, but the articles flow one after the other without the guideposts or interruptions of section headings.

The volume opens with three pieces whose themes repeat throughout the volume. The first piece discusses creativity in terms of systems theory, with music as the center. Although it may seem out of place in this context, it does highlight Goguen’s interest in music, creativity, and the underlying patterns in human experience and computation. The biographical sketch referred to earlier helps us understand Goguen as a human being, and the piece that follows outlines the main contours of his thought. These three articles are the most readily accessible to a general audience, and so they will be of less value to professionals.

The subsequent pieces are more technical than the first three. With specificity and rigor, they engage issues of formal structures, sets, language constructs, and institutions, topics that Goguen engaged throughout his career. They are of interest almost exclusively to specialists in these areas.

The concept of institutions in computer science, which tries to capture essential features of logical systems, was one of Goguen’s seminal contributions, and four of the six pieces grouped under “Meta-Logic” concern themselves with institutions. The pieces on quantum institutions and languages for the semantic Web are especially topical in that these are contemporary areas of research that have immediate practical implications. The two pieces in this section on logic and computer science are especially insightful in their application of abstract algebra to computational structures.

The eight pieces grouped under “Specification and Composition” demonstrate the power of formal methods in the specification of programming languages and systems. One of the threads that pervades this section is the broad applicability of OBJ, the language that Goguen developed. An especially useful article is the piece by Jose Meseguer that traces the languages that have derived from or been influenced by OBJ. This piece suggests the centrality and pervasiveness of Goguen’s contributions to programming languages. The pieces here as a whole demonstrate that theoretical issues have an active force in programming language implementation and specification.

The six pieces collected in “Behavior and Formal Languages” rely heavily on the insights of Goguen into the importance of abstract algebra in computer science. Central topics include automata, regular expressions, regular languages, and regular sets. Of particular merit is “A Bialgebraic Review of Deterministic Regular Expressions and Languages,” which summarizes classical theory in this area, and then extends it by including algebras. A complement to this is provided by “An Algebraic Approach to Regular Sets.”

The final nine pieces, which come under the heading “Models, Deduction, and Computation,” apply broad principles to such diverse areas as specifying complex numbers, software testing, proofs, and drug interactions. The latter provides a useful connection between the theoretical topics and real-world applications. Specific concerns in this section include recursion, pattern matching, and constraint logic programming.

Reviewer:  Marlin Thomas Review #: CR133801 (0801-0023)
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