Skip to main content

North Holland

  • Codes on Euclidean Spheres

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 63
    • T. Ericson + 1 more
    • English
    Codes on Euclidean spheres are often referred to as spherical codes. They are of interest from mathematical, physical and engineering points of view. Mathematically the topic belongs to the realm of algebraic combinatorics, with close connections to number theory, geometry, combinatorial theory, and - of course - to algebraic coding theory. The connections to physics occur within areas like crystallography and nuclear physics. In engineering spherical codes are of central importance in connection with error-control in communication systems. In that context the use of spherical codes is often referred to as "coded modulation." The book offers a first complete treatment of the mathematical theory of codes on Euclidean spheres. Many new results are published here for the first time. Engineering applications are emphasized throughout the text. The theory is illustrated by many examples. The book also contains an extensive table of best known spherical codes in dimensions 3-24, including exact constructions.
  • Graphs of Groups on Surfaces

    Interactions and Models
    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 188
    • A.T. White
    • English
    The book, suitable as both an introductory reference and as a text book in the rapidly growing field of topological graph theory, models both maps (as in map-coloring problems) and groups by means of graph imbeddings on sufaces. Automorphism groups of both graphs and maps are studied. In addition connections are made to other areas of mathematics, such as hypergraphs, block designs, finite geometries, and finite fields. There are chapters on the emerging subfields of enumerative topological graph theory and random topological graph theory, as well as a chapter on the composition of English church-bell music. The latter is facilitated by imbedding the right graph of the right group on an appropriate surface, with suitable symmetries. Throughout the emphasis is on Cayley maps: imbeddings of Cayley graphs for finite groups as (possibly branched) covering projections of surface imbeddings of loop graphs with one vertex. This is not as restrictive as it might sound; many developments in topological graph theory involve such imbeddings.The approach aims to make all this interconnected material readily accessible to a beginning graduate (or an advanced undergraduate) student, while at the same time providing the research mathematician with a useful reference book in topological graph theory. The focus will be on beautiful connections, both elementary and deep, within mathematics that can best be described by the intuitively pleasing device of imbedding graphs of groups on surfaces.
  • Banach Algebras and Compact Operators

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 2
    • English
  • Handbook of Magnetic Materials

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 13
    • K.H.J. Buschow
    • English
    Volume 13 of the Handbook of Magnetic Materials, as the preceding volumes, has a dual purpose. As a textbook it is intended to be of assistance to those who wish to be introduced to a given topic in the field of magnetism without the need to read the vast amount of literature published. As a work of reference it is intended for scientists active in magnetism research. To this dual purpose, Volume 13 of the Handbook is composed of topical review articles written by leading authorities. In each of these articles an extensive description is given in graphical as well as in tabular form, much emphasis being placed on the discussion of the experimental material in the framework of physics, chemistry and material science. In Chapter 1 of this volume a general review of the experimental work on interlayer exchange coupling is presented along with a discussion of the current understanding of this field. There exists an extensive amount of scientific efforts devoted to 4f and 5f systems, including experimental and theoretical, as well as basic and applied research. Chapter 2 aims at reviewing a part of these efforts from the viewpoint of microscopic theory. Special attention is paid to the many new developments in the field. One of the intentions is to bring to the fore the darker areas of DFT theory applications. A review of novel experimental results and first-principle energy-band calculations of MOKE spectra will be presented in Chapter 3. Conventional co-operative phenomena, such as long-range order and elementary excitation, have realisations in nonmagnetic situations. This applies also to the phenomena of geometrical frustration. In Chapter 4 this topic is addressed by developing the basic principles underlying the magnetic phenomena.
  • Nonlinear Equations and Optimisation

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 4
    • L.T. Watson + 2 more
    • English
    /homepage/sac/cam/na... Set now available at special set price !In one of the papers in this collection, the remark that "nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum of minimum does not appear" is attributed to no less an authority than Euler. Simplifying the syntax a little, we might paraphrase this as Everything is an optimization problem. While this might be something of an overstatement, the element of exaggeration is certainly reduced if we consider the extended form: Everything is an optimization problem or a system of equations. This observation, even if only partly true, stands as a fitting testimonial to the importance of the work covered by this volume.Since the 1960s, much effort has gone into the development and application of numerical algorithms for solving problems in the two areas of optimization and systems of equations. As a result, many different ideas have been proposed for dealing efficiently with (for example) severe nonlinearities and/or very large numbers of variables. Libraries of powerful software now embody the most successful of these ideas, and one objective of this volume is to assist potential users in choosing appropriate software for the problems they need to solve. More generally, however, these collected review articles are intended to provide both researchers and practitioners with snapshots of the 'state-of-the-art' with regard to algorithms for particular classes of problem. These snapshots are meant to have the virtues of immediacy through the inclusion of very recent ideas, but they also have sufficient depth of field to show how ideas have developed and how today's research questions have grown out of previous solution attempts.The most efficient methods for local optimization, both unconstrained and constrained, are still derived from the classical Newton approach.As well as dealing in depth with the various classical, or neo-classical, approaches, the selection of papers on optimization in this volume ensures that newer ideas are also well represented.Solving nonlinear algebraic systems of equations is closely related to optimization. The two are not completely equivalent, however, and usually something is lost in the translation.Algorith... for nonlinear equations can be roughly classified as locally convergent or globally convergent. The characterization is not perfect.Locally convergent algorithms include Newton's method, modern quasi-Newton variants of Newton's method, and trust region methods. All of these approaches are well represented in this volume.
  • Rudiments of Calculus

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 146
    • A. Arnold + 1 more
    • English
    This book presents what in our opinion constitutes the basis of the theory of the mu-calculus, considered as an algebraic system rather than a logic. We have wished to present the subject in a unified way, and in a form as general as possible. Therefore, our emphasis is on the generality of the fixed-point notation, and on the connections between mu-calculus, games, and automata, which we also explain in an algebraic way. This book should be accessible for graduate or advanced undergraduate students both in mathematics and computer science. We have designed this book especially for researchers and students interested in logic in computer science, comuter aided verification, and general aspects of automata theory. We have aimed at gathering in a single place the fundamental results of the theory, that are currently very scattered in the literature, and often hardly accessible for interested readers. The presentation is self-contained, except for the proof of the Mc-Naughton's Determinization Theorem (see, e.g., [97]. However, we suppose that the reader is already familiar with some basic automata theory and universal algebra. The references, credits, and suggestions for further reading are given at the end of each chapter.
  • The Theory of Fractional Powers of Operators

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 187
    • C. Martinez + 1 more
    • English
    This book makes available to researchers and advanced graduates a simple and direct presentation of the fundamental aspects of the theory of fractional powers of non-negative operators, which have important links with partial differential equations and harmonic analysis. For the first time ever, a book deals with this subject monographically, despite the large number of papers written on it during the second half of the century. The first chapters are concerned with the construction of a basic theory of fractional powers and study the classic questions in that respect. A new and distinct feature is that the approach adopted has allowed the extension of this theory to locally convex spaces, thereby including certain differential operators, which appear naturally in distribution spaces. The bulk of the second part of the book is dedicated to powers with pure imaginary exponents, which have been the focus of research in recent years, ever since the publication in 1987 of the now classic paper by G.Dore and A.Venni. Special care has been taken to give versions of the results with more accurate hypotheses, particularly with respect to the density of the domain or the range of the operator. The authors have made a point of making the text clear and self-contained. Accordingly, an extensive appendix contains the material on real and functional analysis used and, at the end of each chapter there are detailed historical and bibliographical notes in order to understand the development and current state of research into the questions dealt with.
  • Interpolation and Extrapolation

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 2
    • C. Brezinski
    • English
    /homepage/sac/cam/na... Set now available at special set price!This volume is dedicated to two closely related subjects: interpolation and extrapolation. The papers can be divided into three categories: historical papers, survey papers and papers presenting new developments.Interpo... is an old subject since, as noticed in the paper by M. Gasca and T. Sauer, the term was coined by John Wallis in 1655. Interpolation was the first technique for obtaining an approximation of a function. Polynomial interpolation was then used in quadrature methods and methods for the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations.Extrapolat... is based on interpolation. In fact, extrapolation consists of interpolation at a point outside the interval containing the interpolation points. Usually, this point is either zero or infinity. Extrapolation is used in numerical analysis to improve the accuracy of a process depending of a parameter or to accelerate the convergence of a sequence. The most well-known extrapolation processes are certainly Romberg's method for improving the convergence of the trapezoidal rule for the computation of a definite integral and Aiken's &Dgr;2 process which can be found in any textbook of numerical analysis.Obviously, all aspects of interpolation and extrapolation have not been treated in this volume. However, many important topics have been covered.
  • Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths

    High Temperature Rare Earths Superconductors - I
    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 30
    • K.A. Gschneidner + 2 more
    • English
    This volume of the Handbook is the first of a two-volume set of reviews devoted to the rare-earth-based high-temperature oxide superconductors (commonly known as hiTC superconductors). The history of hiTC superconductors is a few months short of being 14 years old when Bednorz and Müller published their results which showed that (La,BA)2CuO4 had a superconducting transition of ~30 K, which was about 7K higher than any other known superconducting material. Within a year the upper temperature limit was raised to nearly 100K with the discovery of an ~90K superconducting transition in YBa2Cu3O7-&dgr;. The announcement of a superconductor with a transition temperature higher than the boiling point of liquid nitrogen set-off a frenzy of research on trying to find other oxide hiTC superconductors. Within a few months the maximum superconducting transition reached 110 K (Bi2Sr2Ca2Cu3010, and then 122K (TlBa2Ca3Cu4O11. It took several years to push TC up another 11 K to 133 K with the discovery of superconductivity in HgBa2Ca2Cu3O8, which is still the record holder today.
  • Theory of Relations

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 145
    • R. Fraisse
    • English
    Relation theory originates with Hausdorff (Mengenlehre 1914) and Sierpinski (Nombres transfinis, 1928) with the study of order types, specially among chains = total orders = linear orders. One of its first important problems was partially solved by Dushnik, Miller 1940 who, starting from the chain of reals, obtained an infinite strictly decreasing sequence of chains (of continuum power) with respect to embeddability. In 1948 I conjectured that every strictly decreasing sequence of denumerable chains is finite. This was affirmatively proved by Laver (1968), in the more general case of denumerable unions of scattered chains (ie: which do not embed the chain Q of rationals), by using the barrier and the better orderin gof Nash-Williams (1965 to 68).Another important problem is the extension to posets of classical properties of chains. For instance one easily sees that a chain A is scattered if the chain of inclusion of its initial intervals is itself scattered (6.1.4). Let us again define a scattered poset A by the non-embedding of Q in A. We say that A is finitely free if every antichain restriction of A is finite (antichain = set of mutually incomparable elements of the base). In 1969 Bonnet and Pouzet proved that a poset A is finitely free and scattered iff the ordering of inclusion of initial intervals of A is scattered. In 1981 Pouzet proved the equivalence with the a priori stronger condition that A is topologically scattered: (see 6.7.4; a more general result is due to Mislove 1984); ie: every non-empty set of initial intervals contains an isolated elements for the simple convergence topology.In chapter 9 we begin the general theory of relations, with the notions of local isomorphism, free interpretability and free operator (9.1 to 9.3), which is the relationist version of a free logical formula. This is generalized by the back-and-forth notions in 10.10: the (k,p)-operator is the relationist version of the elementary formula (first order formula with equality).Chapter 12 connects relation theory with permutations: theorem of the increasing number of orbits (Livingstone, Wagner in 12.4). Also in this chapter homogeneity is introduced, then more deeply studied in the Appendix written by Norbert Saucer.Chapter 13 connects relation theory with finite permutation groups; the main notions and results are due to Frasnay. Also mention the extension to relations of adjacent elements, by Hodges, Lachlan, Shelah who by this mean give an exact calculus of the reduction threshold.The book covers almost all present knowledge in Relation Theory, from origins (Hausdorff 1914, Sierpinski 1928) to classical results (Frasnay 1965, Laver 1968, Pouzet 1981) until recent important publications (Abraham, Bonnet 1999).All results are exposed in axiomatic set theory. This allows us, for each statement, to specify if it is proved only from ZF axioms of choice, the continuum hypothesis or only the ultrafilter axiom or the axiom of dependent choice, for instance.