Regions with Mediterranean-type climates include parts of California, South America, Australia, and of course, Europe. The effect of global climate change on these heavily populated areas will have major social and political ramifications.
This volume addresses issues in these areas, from processes at the leaf level to the individual, ecosystem, and landscape levels. This book will serve to raise awareness on the significance of these types of ecosystems, and on their sensitivity to the threat that global change represents.

A theory is the more impressive, the simpler are its premises, the more distinct are the things it connects, and the broader is its range of applicability. Albert Einstein There are two different ways of teaching mathematics, namely, (i) the systematic way, and (ii) the application-oriented way. More precisely, by (i), I mean a systematic presentation of the material governed by the desire for mathematical perfection and completeness of the results. In contrast to (i), approach (ii) starts out from the question "What are the most important applications?" and then tries to answer this question...

Although the calculus of variations has ancient origins in questions of Ar- istotle and Zenodoros, its mathematical principles first emerged in the post- calculus investigations of Newton, the Bernoullis, Euler, and Lagrange. Its results now supply fundamental tools of exploration to both mathematicians and those in the applied sciences. (Indeed, the macroscopic statements ob- tained through variational principles may provide the only valid mathemati- cal formulations of many physical laws. ) Because of its classical origins, variational calculus retains the spirit of natural philosophy...

This is intended as a textbook on the history, philosophy and foundations of mathematics, primarily for students specializing in mathematics, but we also wish to welcome interested students from the sciences, humanities and education. We have attempted to give approximately equal treatment to the three subjects: history, philosophy and mathematics. History We must emphasize that this is not a scholarly account of the history of mathematics, but rather an attempt to teach some good mathematics in a historical context. Since neither of the authors is a professional historian, we have made...

This is a textbook suitable for a year-long course in analysis at the ad- vanced undergraduate or possibly beginning-graduate level. It is intended for students with a strong background in calculus and linear algebra, and a strong motivation to learn mathematics for its own sake. At this stage of their education, such students are generally given a course in abstract algebra, and a course in analysis, which give the fundamentals of these two areas, as mathematicians today conceive them. Mathematics is now a subject splintered into many specialties and sub- specialties, but most of it can be...

In 1991, a subcommittee of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology met to document the use of indirect estimators - that is, estimators which use data drawn from a domain or time different from the domain or time for which an estimate is required. This volume comprises the eight reports which describe the use of indirect estimators and they are based on case studies from a variety of federal programs. As a result, many researchers will find this book provides a valuable survey of how indirect estimators are used in practice and which addresses some of the pitfalls of these methods.

The fundamental theorem of algebra states that any complex polynomial must have a complex root. This book examines three pairs of proofs of the theorem from three different areas of mathematics: abstract algebra, complex analysis and topology. The first proof in each pair is fairly straightforward and depends only on what could be considered elementary mathematics. However, each of these first proofs leads to more general results from which the fundamental theorem can be deduced as a direct consequence. These general results constitute the second proof in each pair. To arrive at each of the...

This book is intended to introduce coding theory and information theory to undergraduate students of mathematics and computer science. It begins with a review of probablity theory as applied to finite sample spaces and a general introduction to the nature and types of codes. The two subsequent chapters discuss information theory: efficiency of codes, the entropy of information sources, and Shannon's Noiseless Coding Theorem. The remaining three chapters deal with coding theory: communication channels, decoding in the presence of errors, the general theory of linear codes, and such specific...

This book is an attempt to communicate to undergraduate math- ematics majors my enjoyment of abstract algebra. It grew out of a course offered at California State University, Northridge, in our teacher preparation program, titled Foundations of Algebra, that was intended to provide an advanced perspective on high-school mathe- matics. When I first prepared to teach this course, I needed to select a set of topics to cover. The material that I selected would clearly have to have some bearing on school-level mathematics, but at the same time would have to be substantial enough for a...

This book is a text, not a reference, on Point-set Thpology. It addresses itself to the student who is proficient in Calculus and has some experience with mathematical rigor, acquired, e.g., via a course in Advanced Calculus or Linear Algebra. Th most beginners, Thpology offers a double challenge. In addition to the strangeness of concepts and techniques presented by any new subject, there is an abrupt rise of the level of abstraction. It is a bad idea to teach a student two things at the same moment. Th mitigate the culture shock, we move from the special to the general, dividing the book...