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Kleene Algebra

Published: November 14, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2511.11264v1

By: Tobias Kappé, Alexandra Silva, Jana Wagemaker

Potential Business Impact:

Proves computer programs are equal using math rules.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

This booklet serves as an introduction to Kleene Algebra (KA), a set of laws that can be used to study general equivalences between programs. It discusses how general programs can be modeled using regular expressions, how those expressions correspond to automata, and how this correspondence can be exploited to obtain the central result of KA, namely that an equivalence of regular expressions is true if and only if it can be proved using the laws of KA. Each chapter closes with a set of exercises to further build intuition and understanding, and there is an optional chapter that develops automata theory through the lens of coalgebra.

Page Count
122 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Programming Languages