Customer Reviews

Recursively Enumerable Sets and Degrees: A Study of Computable Functions and Computably Generated Sets (Perspectives in Mathematical Logic)

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This text was specifically written to replace Rogers as the standard graduate introduction. As you will see if you ask around, it wasn't completely successful. That is because, while Rogers is creaking with age, it is interesting. This book is not. It is a detailed and orderly presentation of what the author thinks is important, but that does not include any context, motivation, relations to other math, or applications. It is painfully dull. (There is a 2e in the works, but the excerpts I saw were about the same.) Also, it starts very fast and will be confusing if you haven't already done a book like Cutland. I think the problem is that he has been a master of the subject for so long that he can't put himself in the mind of someone coming to the material for the first time.

The type face selection is excellent. The material is consistently developed throughout. The reader walks away from the first three chapters with a wealth of clear understanding of the sophisticated topics covered. The remaining chapters delve into current research up to the date of publication. Highly recommended for those interested in recursion theory.

It is a standard text book for the students and researchers in recursion theory. You can read it without any recursion background. Once you have read the last page, you can claim you are a recursion theoriest.

But the style of the book has a little out of date. The author are rewriting it.

For those who want to know more about recursion theory, I recommand Rogers' book (but it is an older than Soare's).