In the Summer of 1996 I was invited by Viggo Kann to spend the Spring of 1997 at KTH in Stockholm. Since both Viggo and other people were unanimous in saying that Stockholm in Spring is a wonderful place, I thought I could not miss the opportunity to visit this beautiful city when the sunshine melts coldness of all sorts while at the same time reverberating on the blue bay waters and on people's smiles. Both Viggo and I thought it would be a good idea for me to teach a PhD level course in distributed computing targeted for theory students whose main interest lay in algorithms and complexity theory. The topics selected reflect my own interests of course, but they also meet other conditions. One the one hand, some of the topics presented seem to me relevant enough to be included in the standard curriculum of computer science PhD students because they have a fundamental character. That is, they can be explained with recourse to a minimum amount of formalism and yet say something meaningful about computation. On the other, these topics appear to me to have enough logical and/or mathematical sophistication to be able to spark the interest of bright mathematically minded students such as the ones who were attending the course.
Each lecture note had a scribe who wrote a first draft which I doctored afterwards. In the Fall of 1997 I co-taught a course in Distributed Computing at BRICS together with Mogens Nielsen. That gave me the opportunity to go over a subset of the lecture notes (and produce a new one). That also gave me the opportunity to realize that these lecture notes still need a lot of work!! Nevertheless they might be useful to somebody as they are now and that's why KTH is making them available as a tech report. Hopefully the shame of finding many errors and imprecisions will force me to improve them in the near future.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Viggo for the invitation and above all the students who took my course at KTH. The interaction with them was a rewarding and enjoyable experience.
Alessandro Panconesi