The author of this book, Prof. Vadim Vasilievich Schmidt, was known in the West as 'Russian Schmidt'. Being a talented theoretician and at the same time heading an experimentallaboratory in Chernogolovka, Vadim Schmidt had a unique talent for explaining complicated physical models and ideas in a simple way. One of his favorite sayings was 'physics is a verbal science'. The book is based on his introductory course on superconductivity. It was published in Russian in 1982 and very soon became undoubtedly the most popular Russian textbook on the physics of superconductors. Without losing its...

Zoogeography aims to explain the structure, function and history of the geo graphical ranges of animals. The absence or presence of a species in a given place has ecological as well as historical causes. It is therefore a mistake to suppose that reconstructing the phylogenetic connections of a taxon will by itself give a definite picture of how its range originated. A purely ecological interpretation of the range could be equally misleading if it did not take into account the population-genetic structure underlying the geographical range. Phylogenetic systematics, population genetics,...