In the Eagle's Shadow


Book Description

Contents: Introduction; A New World Created; The Turbulent Era; From Naboth's Vineyard to the Big Stick; The Era of Bad Feelings; The Era of the Good Neighbour; The Death of the Good Neighbour; Years of Hope, Years of Frustration; From Cold War to New New World Order; Index.




The Bieberbach Conjecture


Book Description

In 1919, Bieberbach posed a seemingly simple conjecture. That ``simple'' conjecture challenged mathematicians in complex analysis for the following 68 years! In that time, a huge number of papers discussing the conjecture and its related problems were inspired. Finally in 1984, de Branges completed the solution. In 1989, Professor Gong wrote and published a short book in Chinese, The Bieberbach Conjecture, outlining the history of the related problems and de Branges' proof. The present volume is the English translation of that Chinese edition with modifications by the author. In particular, he includes results related to several complex variables. Open problems and a large number of new mathematical results motivated by the Bieberbach conjecture are included. Completion of a standard one-year graduate complex analysis course will prepare the reader for understanding the book. It would make a nice supplementary text for a topics course at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level.




Concise Calculus


Book Description

Mathematics is the fundamental knowledge for every scientist. As an academic at the University of Science and Technology of China, Professor Sheng Gong takes his passion for mathematics teaching even further. Besides imparting knowledge to students from the Department of Mathematics, he has created and developed his method of teaching Calculus to help students from physics, engineering and other sciences disciplines understand Calculus faster and deeper in order to meet the needs of applications in their own fields.This book is based on Professor Sheng Gong's 42 years of teaching experience along with a touch of applications of Calculus in other fields such as computer science, engineering. Science students will benefit from the unique way of illustrating theorems in Calculus and also perceive Calculus as a whole instead of a combination of separate topics. The practical examples provided in the book bring motivation to students to learn Calculus.




The Cornell Widow


Book Description




Godel


Book Description

Kurt Gödel was an intellectual giant. His Incompleteness Theorem turned not only mathematics but also the whole world of science and philosophy on its head. Shattering hopes that logic would, in the end, allow us a complete understanding of the universe, Gödel's theorem also raised many provocative questions: What are the limits of rational thought? Can we ever fully understand the machines we build? Or the inner workings of our own minds? How should mathematicians proceed in the absence of complete certainty about their results? Equally legendary were Gödel's eccentricities, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his paranoid fear of germs that eventually led to his death from self-starvation. Now, in the first book for a general audience on this strange and brilliant thinker, John Casti and Werner DePauli bring the legend to life.




Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World


Book Description

A global analysis of the effects of social security reforms on the retirement incentives and labor force trends of older workers. Employment among older men and women has increased dramatically in recent years, reversing a downward trend in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World examines how changing retirement incentives have reshaped labor force participation trends among older workers. The chapters feature country-specific analyses for Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They find that while there is significant heterogeneity across countries, the reforms of recent decades have generally reduced the implicit tax on work at older ages. These changes correlate positively with labor force participation. The studies exploit the variation in the timing and extent of reforms of retirement incentives and employ microeconometric methods to investigate whether this correlation reflects a causal relationship. Policy changes appear to have contributed to rising labor force activity, but other factors like the role of women in the labor force, improved health, and changes in private pensions likely also play important roles.




Measure Theory and Integration


Book Description

This self-contained treatment of measure and integration begins with a brief review of the Riemann integral and proceeds to a construction of Lebesgue measure on the real line. From there the reader is led to the general notion of measure, to the construction of the Lebesgue integral on a measure space, and to the major limit theorems, such as the Monotone and Dominated Convergence Theorems. The treatment proceeds to $Lp$ spaces, normed linear spaces that are shown to be complete (i.e., Banach spaces) due to the limit theorems. Particular attention is paid to $L2$ spaces as Hilbert spaces, with a useful geometrical structure. Having gotten quickly to the heart of the matter, the text proceeds to broaden its scope. There are further constructions of measures, including Lebesgue measure on $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. There are also discussions of surface measure, and more generally of Riemannian manifolds and the measures they inherit, and an appendix on the integration ofdifferential forms. Further geometric aspects are explored in a chapter on Hausdorff measure. The text also treats probabilistic concepts, in chapters on ergodic theory, probability spaces and random variables, Wiener measure and Brownian motion, and martingales. This text will prepare graduate students for more advanced studies in functional analysis, harmonic analysis, stochastic analysis, and geometric measure theory.










Quarrying in Antiquity


Book Description

"A wide survey over four millennia is possible for quarrying tools and techniques because of their simplicity and long-lived traditions. The chief contribution of the Romans was their organisation of the stone trade by mass production, standardisation and long-distance transport. Indeed, in post-Roman Europe, especially in Britain, it was the excellence of Roman building stone which allowed so much subsequent 'quarrying' in the buildings themselves. One exception in Saxon times was the quarry for Bradford-on-Avon's church. With the 12th-century spurt in church building activity, however, natural stone quarries once more became common and distribution methods familiar to the Roman world re-emerged." - COPAC.