More than ten years have passed since the untimely death of King-Sun Fu, one of the great pioneers in the field of pattern recognition. It was he, more than any other single individual, who nurtured the field during its formative years, and set the tone and tempo for others to follow. This book is dedicated to his memory. This book contains 11 chapters by authors who knew King-Sun Fu and in varying degrees interacted with him. The articles span the field of pattern recognition in its current state, and cover such diverse topics as neural nets, covariance propagation, genetic selection, shape...

This volume presents the current status of the Standard Model of the electroweak interactions and Higgs physics, aspects of QCD and supersymmetry, and provides particle physics background for astrophysical applications. In addition, there is in-depth coverage of inflation, high temperature field theory and phase transitions in the early universe, baryogenesis, dark matter and structure formation.

This is probably the only textbook available that gathers QCD, many-body theory and phase transitions in one volume. The presentation is pedagogical and readable. It provides materials interesting to both students and researchers of astrophysics, nuclear physics and high energy physics.