Kategoria BISAC: Mathematics >> Topology - General

Acting as the natural sequel to the publication of Brouwer's biography, this book provides instrumental reading for those wishing to gain a deeper understanding of Brouwer and his role in the twentieth century. Striking a good...

Outer billiards is a basic dynamical system defined relative to a convex shape in the plane. B. H. Neumann introduced this system in the 1950s, and J. Moser popularized it as a toy model for celestial mechanics. All along, the so-called Moser-Neumann question has been one of the central problems in the field. This question asks whether or not one can have an outer billiards system with an unbounded orbit. The Moser-Neumann question is an idealized version of the question of whether, because of small disturbances in its orbit, the Earth can break out of its orbit and fly away from the Sun....

After some decades of work a satisfactory theory of quantum gravity is still not available; moreover, there are indications that the original field theoretical approach may be better suited than originally expected. There, to first approximation, one is left with the problem of quantum field theory on Lorentzian manifolds. Surprisingly, this seemingly modest approach leads to far reaching conceptual and mathematical problems and to spectacular predictions, the most famous one being the Hawking radiation of black holes. Ingredients of this approach are the formulation of quantum physics in...

Aus den Rezensionen: "Was das Buch vor allem auszeichnet, ist die unkonventionelle Darstellungsweise. Hier wird Mathematik nicht im trockenen Definition-Satz-Beweis-Stil geboten, sondern sie wird dem Leser pointiert und mit viel Humor schmackhaft gemacht. In ungewohnlich fesselnder Sprache geschrieben, ist die Lekture dieses Buches auch ein belletristisches Vergnugen. Fast 200 sehr instruktive und schone Zeichnungen unterstutzen das Verstandnis, motivieren die behandelten Aussagen, modellieren die tragenden Beweisideen heraus. Ungewohnlich ist auch das Register, das unter...

The concept of symmetric space is of central importance in many branches of mathematics. Compactifications of these spaces have been studied from the points of view of representation theory, geometry, and random walks. This work is devoted to the study of the interrelationships among these various compactifications and, in particular, focuses on the martin compactifications. It is the first exposition to treat compactifications of symmetric spaces systematically and to uniformized the various points of view. The work is largely self-contained, with comprehensive references to the...

Since the beginning of the modern era of algebraic topology, simplicial methods have been used systematically and effectively for both computation and basic theory. With the development of Quillen's concept of a closed model category and, in particular, a simplicial model category, this collection of methods has become the primary way to describe non-abelian homological algebra and to address homotopy-theoretical issues in a variety of fields, including algebraic K-theory. This book supplies a modern exposition of these ideas, emphasizing model category theoretical techniques.

It has only been a couple of decades since Benoit Mandelbrot published his famous picture of what is now called the Mandelbrot set. That picture, now seeming graphically primitive, has changed our view of the mathematical and physical universe. The properties and circumstances of the discovery of the Mandelbrot Set continue to generate much interest in the research community and beyond. This book contains the hard-to-obtain original papers, many unpublished illustrations dating back to 1979 and extensive documented historical context showing how Mandelbrot helped change our way of looking...