KLEEN CLOSURE

Named after its inventor Stephen Cole Kleene, The Kleene closure of a set A denoted by (A*) is
the set of all strings (or alternatively lists) of finite length, whose characters are elements of set
A.

for example, if set A is {0}, then its Kleene closure A* is: {"", "0", "00", "000", ...}

if set B is {0,1} then B* is {"", "0", "1", "00", "01", "10", "11", "000", "001", ...}

The empty string is always present. The base set of characters need not be finite. The Kleene
closure is also called the Kleene star.

The Kleene closure is used pretty often in daily computer use, for example, if you want to search
for all the text files in the current directory, you might type: "dir *.txt", the * sign really means
"Match with any element of the Kleene closure of characters."

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Languages are sets, so we can take any two languages (over the same alphabet) and take their
union to form a new language. Just as a reminder:

Definition 7: The union of two sets L and K is the set with all the members found in either, and
is written L ∪ K.

We're going to take the Kleene Star one level further and say that it applies to languages too.

Definition 8: The Kleene Closure of a language L is L* = { e } ∪ L ∪ LL ∪ LLL …

Got it? L* is the language consisting of set of strings, where those strings are any number of
strings in L concatenated together.

I want to extend our notion of concatenation in one more way. When I write a string or string
variable next to a language, I mean "concatenate the language onto the end of the language that
consists of only this string". So when I say abLa I mean {ab}L{a} Again, you can infer the
braces from the context.

Let's do an example of using * and string concatenation of languages, just so its clear.

S = {0, 1}
L = {011*}
1L* = {1, 101, 1011, 101101, 1011011, …}

Or, in English, this is the set of strings w in S* such that w:

• starts with a single 1,

 • has no more than one 0 in a row, and
• ends with 1

We need one more thing to make this notation sufficiently terse. You probably noticed that the
Kleene Star above only applied to the thing immediately to the star's left, whether the language
or the symbol. Suppose we've got four languages: H, J, K and L. We can form two new
languages through concatenation: G = HJ and F = KL. And then we can form a seventh
language, D = G*F*. But we can't write D = HJ*KL*, because that's a different language. What
we mean is D = (HJ)*(KL)*.

Therefore I'm declaring that we can use parenthesis in the normal way we're all used to for order
of operations. We will figure out from context whether parens mean "this is a finite sequence" or
"this is a grouping of concatenations".

Remember, we're looking for a way to concisely characterize languages, and clearly we're onto
something here. We now have union, grouping, concatenation and Kleene closure. In other
words, we have enough tools to define regular expressions, which we'll do next time. Stay tuned!

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