The purpose of this thesis is to give a "foundational" characterization of some common complexity classes. Such a characterization is distinguished by the fact that no explicit resource bounds are used. For example, we characterize the polynomial time computable functions without making any direct reference to polynomials, time, or even computation. Complexity classes characterized in this way include polynomial time, the functional polytime hierarchy, the logspace decidable problems, and NC. After developing these "resource free" definitions, we apply them to redeveloping the feasible logical system of Cook and Urquhart, and show how this first-order system relates to the second-order system of Leivant. The connection is an interesting one since the systems were defined independently and have what appear to be very different rules for the principle of induction. Furthermore it is interesting to see, albeit in a very specific context, how to retract a second order statement, ("inducti...

Abstract. The main results of this paper are recursion-theoretic characterizations of two parallel complexity classes: the functions computable by uniform bounded fan-in circuit families of log and polylog depth (or equivalently, the functions bitwise computable by alternating Turing machines in log and polylog time). The present characterizations avoid the complex base functions, function constructors, and a priori size or depth bounds typical of previous work on these classes. This simplicity is achieved by extending the \tiered recursion " techniques of Leivant and Bellantoni&Cook. Key words. Circuit complexity � subrecursion. Subject classi cations. 68Q15, 03D20, 94C99. 1.

Abstract. Traditional results in subrecursion theory are integrated with the recent work in “predicative recursion ” by defining a simple ranking ρ of all primitive recursive functions. The hierarchy defined by this ranking coincides with the Grzegorczyk hierarchy at and above the linearspace level. Thus, the result is like an extension of the Schwichtenberg/Müller theorems. When primitive recursion is replaced by recursion on notation, the same series of classes is obtained except with the polynomial time computable functions at the first level.