Factorizable Language: From Dynamics to Biology

There is no universal measure of complexity. When the problem under study leads to description by means of symbolic sequences, formal language theory may provide a convenient framework for analysis. In this review we concentrate on a special class of languages, namely, factorizable languages to be defined later, which occur in many problems of dynamics and biology. In dynamics we have in mind symbolic dynamics of unimodal maps and complexity of cellular automata. In biology we draw examples from DNA and protein sequence analysis.