Alexander Meduna, PhD, is a full professor of computer science at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, where he earned his doctorate in 1988. From 1988 until 1997, he taught computer science at the University of MissouriColumbia in the United States. Even more intensively, since 2000, he has taught computer science and mathematics at the Brno University of Technology. In addition to these two universities, he has taught computer science at several other American, European, and Japanese universities for shorter periods of time. His classes have been primarily focused on formal language theory and its applications in theoretical and practical computer science. His teaching has also covered various topics including automata, discrete mathematics, operating systems, and principles of programming languages. Among many other awards for his scholarship and writing, he received the Distinguished University Professor Award from Siemens in 2012. He enjoys teaching classes related to the subject of this book very much.

Alexander Meduna has written several books. Specifically, he is the author of two textbooks Automata and Languages (Springer, 2000) and Elements of Compiler Design (Taylor & Francis, 2008; translated into Chinese in 2009). Furthermore, he is the co-author of three monographsGrammars with Context Conditions and Their Applications (along with Martin Švec, Wiley, 2005), Scattered Context Grammars and Their Applications (with Jiří Techet, WIT Press, 2010), and Regulated Grammars and Automata (with Petr Zemek, Springer, 2013). He has published over ninety studies in prominent international journals, such as Acta Informatica (Springer), International Journal of Computer Mathematics (Taylor and Francis), and Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier). All his scientific work discusses the theory of formal languages and computation, the subject of this book, or closely related topics, such as compiler writing.

Alexander Meduna’s Web site is http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~meduna. His scientific work is described in detail at http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~meduna/work.