Physics and Theoretical Computer Science: From Numbers and Languages to (Quantum) Cryptography - Volume 7 NATO Security through Science Series: Information and Communication Securi Book

The goal of this publication is to reinforce the interface between physical sciences, theoretical computer science, and discrete mathematics. The intersection of combinatorics and statistical physics has been an area of great activity over the past few years, fertilized by an exchange not only of techniques but of objectives as well. Some of the topics of particular interest are: percolation, random coloring, mixing, homomorphisms from and to fixed graph, phase transitions, threshold phenomena. This book is aimed to assemble theoretical physicists and specialists of theoretical informatics and discrete mathematics in order to learn more about recent developments in cryptography, algorithmics, symbolic calculus, non-standard numeration systems, algebraic combinatorics, automata etc., which could reveal themselves to be of crucial interest in natural sciences. This volume is organized along the following rough thematic division: Physics; Chaos and Fractals; Quasi-Crystals and Tilings; Numeration, Automata, and Languages; Algebraic Combinatorics; and Graphs and Networks.