Mathematical Linguistics introduces the mathematical foundations of linguistics to computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians interested in natural language processing. The book presents linguistics as a cumulative body of knowledge from the ground up: no prior knowledge of linguistics is assumed. Previous textbooks in this area concentrate on syntax and semantics - this comprehensive volume covers an extremely rich array of topics also including phonology and morphology, probabilistic approaches, complexity, learnability, and the analysis of speech and handwriting. As the first textbook of its kind, this book is useful for those in information science (information retrieval and extraction, search engines) and in natural language technologies (speech recognition, optical character recognition, HCI). Exercises suitable for the advanced reader are included, as well as suggestions for further reading and an extensive bibliography.