Some Reflections on Mathematics and Its Relation to Computer Science

Abstract

This paper resulted from a talk I gave at Machines, Computations and Universality 2013 in Zürich and I am very much indebted to the organizers and the participants of this conference for a very fruitful discussion. I am particularly grateful to Maurice Margenstern who, since he was a reader of my PhD, has given me several useful advices related to my work and has often motivated me for inquiring further into problems of decidability and undecidability in the context of tag systems, and more generally, for developing my thoughts on experimental mathematics and computer science