The book was written by two American scientists, one of whom - Garrett Birkhoff - is known for the breadth of his scientific interests, stretching from abstract algebra to hydrodynamics, and the other - Thomas Barty - is the director of the computing laboratory at Harvard University. The book outlines those ideas and methods of modern algebra that have found wide application in such fields as the theory of automata and computers, message transmission and coding, programming languages ​ ​ and mathematical linguistics.