This special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science is dedicated to the memory of Barry Cooper (October 9, 1943–October 26, 2015). Barry's life in research had a huge impact on the development of the world of computability. Aside from his enormous achievements in classical computability theory, he contributed immensely to the promotion of interdisciplinary developments related to computability, in particular, by founding the Association for Computability in Europe (CiE) and its annual, highly successful conference series.

It is well-known that cellular automata can be characterized as the set of translation-invariant continuous functions over a compact metric space; this point of view makes it easy to extend their definition from grids to Cayley graphs. Cayley graphs have a number of useful features: the ability to graphically represent finitely generated group elements and their relations; to name all vertices relative to an origin; and the fact that they have a well-defined notion of translation. We propose a notion of graphs, which preserves or generalizes these features. Whereas Cayley graphs are very regular, generalized Cayley graphs are arbitrary, although of a bounded degree. We extend cellular automata theory to these arbitrary, bounded degree, time-varying graphs. The obtained notion of cellular automata is stable under composition and under inversion.

In this paper, we investigate splitting and non-splitting properties in the Ershov difference hierarchy, in which area major contributions have been made by Barry Cooper with his students and colleagues. In the first part of the paper, we give a brief survey of his research in this area and discuss a number of related open questions. In the second part of the paper, we consider a splitting of 0′ with some additional properties.

We study autostability spectra relative to strong constructivizations (SC-autostability spectra). For a decidable structure $\mathcal{S}$ , the SC-autostability spectrum of $\mathcal{S}$ is the set of all Turing degrees capable of computing isomorphisms among arbitrary decidable copies of $\mathcal{S}$ . The degree of SC-autostability for $\mathcal{S}$ is the least degree in the spectrum (if such a degree exists).

We prove that for a computable successor ordinal α, every Turing degree c.e. in and above 0 (α) is the degree of SC-autostability for some decidable structure. We show that for an infinite computable ordinal β, every Turing degree c.e. in and above 0 (2β+1) is the degree of SC-autostability for some discrete linear order. We prove that the set of all PA-degrees is an SC-autostability spectrum. We also obtain similar results for autostability spectra relative to n-constructivizations.

Building on previous work by Mummert et al. (2015, The modal logic of Reverse Mathematics. Archive for Mathematical54 (3–4) 425–437), we study the logic underlying the web of implications and non-implications which constitute the so called reverse mathematics zoo. We introduce a tableaux system for this logic and natural deduction systems for important fragments of the language.

In the framework of effectively enumerable topological spaces, we introduce the notion of a partial computable function. We show that the class of partial computable functions is closed under composition, and the real-valued partial computable functions defined on a computable Polish space have a principal computable numbering. With respect to the principal computable numbering of the real-valued partial computable functions, we investigate complexity of important problems such as totality and root verification. It turns out that for some problems the corresponding complexity does not depend on the choice of a computable Polish space, whereas for other ones the corresponding choice plays a crucial role.

We show that polynomial time Turing equivalence and a large class of other equivalence relations from computational complexity theory are universal countable Borel equivalence relations. We then discuss ultrafilters on the invariant Borel sets of these equivalence relations which are related to Martin's ultrafilter on the Turing degrees.

(1) There is a finitely presented group with a word problem which is a uniformly effectively inseparable equivalence relation. (2) There is a finitely generated group of computable permutations with a word problem which is a universal co-computably enumerable equivalence relation. (3) Each c.e. truth-table degree contains the word problem of a finitely generated group of computable permutations.