This is the first critical history of the philosophical culture of the USSR, and the first substantial treatment of a modern Soviet philosopher's work by a Western author. The book identifies a significant tradition within Soviet Marxism that has produced powerful theories exploring the origins of meaning and value, the relation of thought and language, and the nature of the self. The tradition is presented through the work of Evald Ilyenkov (1924-79), the thinker who did the most to rejuvenate Soviet philosophy after its suppression under Stalin. Professor Bakhurst sets Ilyenkov's...

This volume contains nine invited papers that survey many areas of current research in combinatorics both on the theoretical and practical side. Several papers may be regarded as summarizing our present state of knowledge in a particular topic.

This volume reflects the progress made in many branches of recent research in Banach space theory, an analytic approach to geometry. Including papers by most of the leading figures in the area, it is intended to illustrate the interplay of Banach space theory with harmonic analysis, probability, complex function theory, and finite dimensional convexity theory. The papers consist of a selection of surveys and original research.

The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in our understanding of early animal development. The revised edition of this excellent book describes the results of this revolution and explains in detail how the body plan of an embryo emerges from a newly fertilized egg. The book starts with a critical discussion of embryological concepts, and with simple mathematics describes cell states, morphogen gradients, and threshold responses. The experimental evidence of the mechanisms of regional specification in vertebrates, insects, and selected invertebrates, namely frogs (Xenopus), mice, chicks,...

This is the first exposition of the theory of quasi-symmetric designs, that is, combinatorial designs with at most two block intersection numbers. The authors aim to bring out the interaction among designs, finite geometries, and strongly regular graphs. The book starts with basic, classical material on designs and strongly regular graphs and continues with a discussion of some important results on quasi-symmetric designs. The later chapters include a combinatorial construction of the Witt designs from the projective plane of order four, recent results dealing with a structural study of...

The present book is devoted to one of the newest branches of variety theory: varieties of group representations. In addition to its intrinsic value, it has numerous connections with varieties of groups, rings and Lie algebras, polynomial identities, group rings, etc., and provides results, methods and ideas that are of interest to a broad algebraic audience. The book presents a clear and detailed exposition of several central topics in the field, leading from initial definitions and problems to the most current advances and developments. Among the topics treated are stable and unipotent...

Traditionally, the Adams-Novikov spectral sequence has been a tool that has enabled the computation of generators and relations to describe homotopy groups. Here a natural geometric description of the sequence is given in terms of cobordism theory and manifolds with singularities. The author brings together many interesting results not widely known outside the USSR, including some recent work by Vershinin.

Algebraic geometers have renewed their interest in the interplay between algebraic vector bundles and projective embeddings. New methods have been developed for questions such as: What is the geometric content of syzygies and of bundles derived from them? How can they be used for giving good compactifications of natural families? Which differential techniques are needed for the study of families of projective varieties? These questions are addressed in this cohesive volume, where results, work in progress, conjectures, and modern accounts of classical ideas are presented.

This is the first treatment in book form of the applications of the lower K- and L-groups (which are the components of the Grothendieck groups of modules and quadratic forms over polynomial extension rings) to the topology of manifolds such as Euclidean spaces, via Whitehead torsion and the Wall finiteness and surgery obstructions. The author uses only elementary constructions and gives a full algebraic account of the groups involved; of particular note is an algebraic treatment of geometric transversality for maps to the circle.

This is a collection of thirty-five articles, covering topics such as finite projective spaces, generalized polygons, strongly regular graphs, diagram geometries, and polar spaces. Contained here are articles from many of the leading practitioners in the field including, for the first time, several distinguished Russian mathematicians. Many of the papers contain important new results and the growing use of computer algebra packages in this area is also demonstrated.