Logical Foundations of Proof Complexity

Stephen Cook is a professor at the University of Toronto. He is author of many research papers, including his famous 1971 paper 'The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures', and the 1982 recipient of the Turing Award. He was awarded a Steacie Fellowship in 1977 and a Killam Research Fellowship in 1982 and received the CRM/Fields Institute Prize in 1999. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada and was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences (United States) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Phuong Nguyen (Nguyễn Thế Phương) received his MSc and PhD degrees from University of Toronto in 2004 and 2008 respectively. He has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships by the Eduard Čech Center for Algebra and Geometry (the Czech Republic) for 2008–9, and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), effective September 2009.

• 1. Introduction; 2. The predicate calculus and the system; 3. Peano arithmetic and its subsystems; 4. Two-sorted logic and complexity classes; 5. The theory V0 and AC0; 6. The theory V1 and polynomial time; 7. Propositional translations; 8. Theories for polynomial time and beyond; 9. Theories for small classes; 10. Proof systems and the reflection principle; 11. Computation models.

'The book under review is a comprehensive introduction to bounded arithmetic … While the book is primarily aimed at students and researchers with background in theoretical computer science, its prerequisites in computational complexity are rather mild and are summarized in the Appendix, thus the book should be easily accessible to logicians and mathematicians coming from a different background. Some familiarity with logic will help the reader, but in this respect the book is more or less self-contained, the relevant bits of proof theory and model theory are developed in the first chapters in detail.' Zentralblatt MATH