Small Dynamic Complexity Classes was awarded the E.W. Beth Dissertation Prize 2016 for
outstanding dissertations in the fields of logic language and information. The thesis studies
the foundations of query re-evaluation after modifying a database. It explores the structure of
small dynamic descriptive complexity classes and provides new methods for proving lower bounds
in this dynamic context. One of the contributions to the former aspect helped to confirm the
conjecture by Patnaik and Immerman (1997) that reachability can be maintained by first-order
update formulas.
