The Minangkabau, who are from the mountainous region of western Sumatra, have long been a tangle of paradoxes to the outsider. Ardent believers in Islam - a partially orientated religion - the Minangkabau are one of the few remaining matrilineal groups in the world. A well-educated and enterprising people, they continue to uphold a seemingly archaic kinship system. They have always been highly mobile, yet their strong sense of ethnic identity is rooted in their homeland. Focusing on Minangkabau matriliny and its relation to migration, Tsuyoshi Kato has written a comprehensive and...

This book provides comprehensive analysis of dynamical systems in tropical geometry, which include the author's significant discoveries and pioneering contributions. Tropical geometry is a kind of dynamical scale transform which connects real rational dynamics with piecewise linear one presented by max and plus algebras. A comparison method is given which estimates orbits corresponding to different rational dynamics by reduction to the piecewise linear dynamics.

Both rational and piecewise linear dynamics appear in many important branches of mathematics. Tropical geometry can play a...