Each undergraduate course of algebra begins with basic notions and results concerning groups, rings, modules and linear algebra. That is, it begins with simple notions and simple results. Our intention was to provide a collection of exercises which cover only the easy part of ring theory, what we have named the "Basics of Ring Theory." This seems to be the part each student or beginner in ring theory (or even algebra) should know - but surely trying to solve as many of these exercises as possible independently. As difficult (or impossible) as this may seem, we have made every effort to avoid modules, lattices and field extensions in this collection and to remain in the ring area as much as possible. A brief look at the bibliography obviously shows that we don't claim much originality (one could name this the folklore of ring theory) for the statements of the exercises we have chosen (but this was a difficult task: indeed, the 28 titles contain approximatively 15.000 problems and our collection contains only 346). The real value of our book is the part which contains all the solutions of these exercises. We have tried to draw up these solutions as detailed as possible, so that each beginner can progress without skilled help. The book is divided in two parts each consisting of seventeen chapters, the first part containing the exercises and the second part the solutions.

This volume summarizes recent developments in the topological and algebraic structures in fuzzy sets and may be rightly viewed as a continuation of the stan dardization of the mathematics of fuzzy sets established in the "Handbook," namely the Mathematics of Fuzzy Sets: Logic, Topology, and Measure Theory, Volume 3 of The Handbooks of Fuzzy Sets Series (Kluwer Academic Publish ers, 1999). Many of the topological chapters of the present work are not only based upon the foundations and notation for topology laid down in the Hand book, but also upon Handbook developments in convergence, uniform spaces, compactness, separation axioms, and canonical examples; and thus this work is, with respect to topology, a continuation of the standardization of the Hand book. At the same time, this work significantly complements the Handbook in regard to algebraic structures. Thus the present volume is an extension of the content and role of the Handbook as a reference work. On the other hand, this volume, even as the Handbook, is a culmination of mathematical developments motivated by the renowned International Sem inar on Fuzzy Set Theory, also known as the Linz Seminar, held annually in Linz, Austria. Much of the material of this volume is related to the Twenti eth Seminar held in February 1999, material for which the Seminar played a crucial and stimulating role, especially in providing feedback, connections, and the necessary screening of ideas."

Tensor Analysis and Nonlinear Tensor Functions embraces the basic fields of tensor calculus: tensor algebra, tensor analysis, tensor description of curves and surfaces, tensor integral calculus, the basis of tensor calculus in Riemannian spaces and affinely connected spaces, - which are used in mechanics and electrodynamics of continua, crystallophysics, quantum chemistry etc.

The book suggests a new approach to definition of a tensor in space R3, which allows us to show a geometric representation of a tensor and operations on tensors. Based on this approach, the author gives a mathematically rigorous definition of a tensor as an individual object in arbitrary linear, Riemannian and other spaces for the first time.

It is the first book to present a systematized theory of tensor invariants, a theory of nonlinear anisotropic tensor functions and a theory of indifferent tensors describing the physical properties of continua.

The book will be useful for students and postgraduates of mathematical, mechanical engineering and physical departments of universities and also for investigators and academic scientists working in continuum mechanics, solid physics, general relativity, crystallophysics, quantum chemistry of solids and material science.

We dedicate this volume to Professor Parimala on the occasion of her 60th birthday. It contains a variety of papers related to the themes of her research. Parimala's rst striking result was a counterexample to a quadratic analogue of Serre's conjecture (Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 1976). Her in uence has cont- ued through her tenure at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai (1976-2006),and now her time at Emory University in Atlanta (2005-present). A conference was held from 30 December 2008 to 4 January 2009, at the U- versity of Hyderabad, India, to celebrate Parimala's 60th birthday (see the conf- ence's Web site at http://mathstat.uohyd.ernet.in/conf/quadforms2008). The or- nizing committee consisted of J.-L. Colliot-Thel ' en ' e, Skip Garibaldi, R. Sujatha, and V. Suresh. The present volume is an outcome of this event. We would like to thank all the participants of the conference, the authors who have contributed to this volume, and the referees who carefully examined the s- mitted papers. We would also like to thank Springer-Verlag for readily accepting to publish the volume. In addition, the other three editors of the volume would like to place on record their deep appreciation of Skip Garibaldi's untiring efforts toward the nal publication.

This book is concerned with the role played by modules of infinite length when dealing with problems in the representation theory of groups and algebras, but also in topology and geometry; it shows the intriguing interplay between finite and infinite length modules.
The volume presents the invited lectures of a conference devoted to "Infinite Length Modules," held at Bielefeld in September 1998, which brought together experts from quite different schools in order to survey surprising relations between algebra, topology and geometry. Some additional reports have been included in order to establish a unified picture. The collection of articles, written by well-known experts from all parts of the world, is conceived as a sort of handbook which provides an easy access to the present state of knowledge and its aim is to stimulate further development.

This book is designed to serve as a textbook for courses offered to undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in Mathematics. Using elementary row operations and Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization as basic tools the text develops characterization of equivalence and similarity, and various factorizations such as rank factorization, OR-factorization, Schurtriangularization, Diagonalization of normal matrices, Jordan decomposition, singular value decomposition, and polar decomposition. Along with Gauss-Jordan elimination for linear systems, it also discusses best approximations and least-squares solutions. The book includes norms on matrices as a means to deal with iterative solutions of linear systems and exponential of a matrix. The topics in the book are dealt with in a lively manner. Each section of the book has exercises to reinforce the concepts, and problems have been added at the end of each chapter. Most of these problems are theoretical, and they do not fit into the running text linearly. The detailed coverage and pedagogical tools make this an ideal textbook for students and researchers enrolled in senior undergraduate and beginning postgraduate mathematics courses.

Positivity is one of the most basic mathematical concepts. In many areas of mathematics (like analysis, real algebraic geometry, functional analysis, etc.) it shows up as positivity of a polynomial on a certain subset of R^n which itself is often given by polynomial inequalities. The main objective of the book is to give useful characterizations of such polynomials. It takes as starting point Hilbert's 17th Problem from 1900 and explains how E. Artin's solution of that problem eventually led to the development of real algebra towards the end of the 20th century. Beyond basic knowledge in algebra, only valuation theory as explained in the appendix is needed. Thus the monograph can also serve as the basis for a 2-semester course in real algebra.

This volume gives an up-to-date review of the subject Integration in Finite Terms. The book collects four significant texts together with an extensive bibliography and commentaries discussing these works and their impact. These texts, either out of print or never published before, are fundamental to the subject of the book. Applications in combinatorics and physics have aroused a renewed interest in this well-developed area devoted to finding solutions of differential equations and, in particular, antiderivatives, expressible in terms of classes of elementary and special functions.

Preventing Harmful Behaviour in Online Communities explores the ethics and logistics of censoring problematic communications online that might encourage a person to engage in harmful behaviour. Using an approach based on theories of digital rhetoric and close primary source analysis, Zoe Alderton draws on group dynamics research in relation to the way in which some online communities foster negative and destructive ideas, encouraging community members to engage in practices including self-harm, disordered eating, and suicide. This book offers insight into the dangerous gap between the clinical community and caregivers versus the pro-anorexia and pro-self-harm communities - allowing caregivers or medical professionals to understand hidden online communities young people in their care may be part of. It delves into the often-unanticipated needs of those who band together to resist the healthcare community, suggesting practical ways to address their concerns and encourage healing. Chapters investigate the alarming ease with which ideas of self-harm can infect people through personal contact, community unease, or even fiction and song and the potential of the internet to transmit self-harmful ideas across countries and even periods of time. The book also outlines the real nature of harm-based communities online, examining both their appeal and dangers, while also examining self-censorship and intervention methods for dealing with harmful content online. Rather than pointing to punishment or censorship as best practice, the book offers constructive guidelines that outline a more holistic approach based on the validity of expressing negative mood and the creation of safe peer support networks, making it ideal reading for professionals protecting vulnerable people, as well as students and academics in psychology, mental health, and social care.

Daniel Quillen's definition of the higher algebraic K-groups of a ring emphasized the importance of computing the homology of groups of matrices. This text traces the development of this theory from Quillen's fundamental calculation. It presents the stability theorems and low-dimensional results of A. Suslin, W. van der Kallen and others are presented. Coverage also examines the Friedlander-Milnor-conjecture concerning the homology of algebraic groups made discrete.

This book follows a conversational approach in five dozen stories that provide an insight into the colorful world of financial mathematics and financial markets in a relaxed, accessible and entertaining form. The authors present various topics such as returns, real interest rates, present values, arbitrage, replication, options, swaps, the Black-Scholes formula and many more. The readers will learn how to discover, analyze, and deal with the many financial mathematical decisions the daily routine constantly demands. The book covers a wide field in terms of scope and thematic diversity. Numerous stories are inspired by the fields of deterministic financial mathematics, option valuation, portfolio optimization and actuarial mathematics. The book also contains a collection of basic concepts and formulas of financial mathematics and of probability theory. Thus, also readers new to the subject will be provided with all the necessary information to verify the calculations.

Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the "tree" of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not' grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory arid the struc ture of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces. And in addition to this there are such new emerging subdisciplines as "completely integrable systems," "chaos, synergetics and large-5cale order," which are almost impossible to fit into the existing classification schemes. They draw upon widely different sections of mathematics. This program, Mathematics and Its Applications, is devoted to such (new) interrelations as exampla gratia: - a central concept which plays an important role in several different mathe matical and/or scientific specialized areas; - new applications of the results and ideas from one area of scientific en deavor into another; - influences which the results, problems and concepts of one field of enquiry have and have had on the development of another."

This book includes discussions related to solutions of such tasks as: probabilistic description of the investment function; recovering the income function from GDP estimates; development of models for the economic cycles; selecting the time interval of pseudo-stationarity of cycles; estimating characteristics/parameters of cycle models; analysis of accuracy of model factors. All of the above constitute the general principles of a theory explaining the phenomenon of economic cycles and provide mathematical tools for their quantitative description. The introduced theory is applicable to macroeconomic analyses as well as econometric estimations of economic cycles.

To our wives, Masha and Marian Interest in the so-called completely integrable systems with infinite num ber of degrees of freedom was aroused immediately after publication of the famous series of papers by Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, Miura, and Zabusky [75, 77, 96, 18, 66, 19J (see also [76]) on striking properties of the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. It soon became clear that systems of such a kind possess a number of characteristic properties, such as infinite series of symmetries and/or conservation laws, inverse scattering problem formulation, L - A pair representation, existence of prolongation structures, etc. And though no satisfactory definition of complete integrability was yet invented, a need of testing a particular system for these properties appeared. Probably one of the most efficient tests of this kind was first proposed by Lenard [19]' who constructed a recursion operator for symmetries of the KdV equation. It was a strange operator, in a sense: being formally integro-differential, its action on the first classical symmetry (x-translation) was well-defined and produced the entire series of higher KdV equations; but applied to the scaling symmetry, it gave expressions containing terms of the type J u dx which had no adequate interpretation in the framework of the existing theories. It is not surprising that P. Olver wrote "The de duction of the form of the recursion operator (if it exists) requires a certain amount of inspired guesswork. . . " [80, p.

This textbook covers topics of undergraduate mathematics in abstract algebra, geometry, topology and analysis with the purpose of connecting the underpinning key ideas. It guides STEM students towards developing knowledge and skills to enrich their scientific education. In doing so it avoids the common mechanical approach to problem-solving based on the repetitive application of dry formulas. The presentation preserves the mathematical rigour throughout and still stays accessible to undergraduates. The didactical focus is threaded through the assortment of subjects and reflects in the book's structure. Part 1 introduces the mathematical language and its rules together with the basic building blocks. Part 2 discusses the number systems of common practice, while the backgrounds needed to solve equations and inequalities are developed in Part 3. Part 4 breaks down the traditional, outdated barriers between areas, exploring in particular the interplay between algebra and geometry. Two appendices form Part 5: the Greek etymology of frequent terms and a list of mathematicians mentioned in the book. Abundant examples and exercises are disseminated along the text to boost the learning process and allow for independent work. Students will find invaluable material to shepherd them through the first years of an undergraduate course, or to complement previously learnt subject matters. Teachers may pick'n'mix the contents for planning lecture courses or supplementing their classes.

This is the Proceedings of the ICM 2010 Satellite Conference on "Buildings, Finite Geometries and Groups" organized at the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, during August 29 - 31, 2010. This is a collection of articles by some of the currently very active research workers in several areas related to finite simple groups, Chevalley groups and their generalizations: theory of buildings, finite incidence geometries, modular representations, Lie theory, etc. These articles reflect the current major trends in research in the geometric and combinatorial aspects of the study of these groups.

The unique perspective the authors bring in their articles on the current developments and the major problems in their area is expected to be very useful to research mathematicians, graduate students and potential new entrants to these areas.

Thomas Harriot's "Artis analyticae praxis" is an essential work in the history of algebra. To some extent it is a development work of Viete, who was among the first to use literal symbols to stand for known and unknown quantities. But it was Harriot who took the crucial step of creating an entirely symbolic algebra, so that reasoning could be reduced to a quasi-mechanical manipulation of symbols. Although his algebra was still limited in scope (he insisted. for example, on strict homogeneity, so only terms of the same powers could be added or equated to one another), it is recognizably modern. Although Harriot's book was highly influential in the development of analysis in England before Newton, it has recently become clear that the posthumously published Praxis contains only an incomplete account of Harriot's achievement: his editor substantially rearranged the work before publishing it, and omitted sections that were apparently beyond his comprehension, such as negative and complex roots of equations. The commentary included with the translation attempts to restore the Praxis to the state of Harriot's draft. Basing their work on manuscripts in the British Library, Pentworth House, and Lambeth Palace, the commentary contains some of Harriot's most novel and advanced mathematics, very little of which has been published in the past. It will provide the basis for a reassessment of the development of algebra.

The present work is the first ever English translation of the original text of Thomas Harriota (TM)s Artis Analyticae Praxis, first published in 1631 in Latin. Thomas Harriota (TM)s Praxis is an essential work in the history of algebra. Even though Harriota (TM)s contemporary, Viete, was among the first to use literal symbols to stand for known and unknown quantities, it was Harriott who took the crucial step of creating an entirely symbolic algebra. This allowed reasoning to be reduced to a quasi-mechanical manipulation of symbols. Although Harriota (TM)s algebra was still limited in scope (he insisted, for example, on strict homogeneity, so only terms of the same powers could be added or equated to one another), it is recognizably modern.

While Harriota (TM)s book was highly influential in the development of analysis in England before Newton, it has recently become clear that the posthumously published Praxis contains only an incomplete account of Harriota (TM)s achievement: his editor substantially rearranged the work before publishing it, and omitted sections that were apparently beyond comprehension, such as negative and complex roots of equations.

The commentary included with this translation relates the contents of the Praxis to the corresponding pages in his manuscript papers, which enables much of Harriot's most novel and advanced mathematics to be explored. This publication will become an important contribution to the history of mathematics, and it will provide the basis for a reassessment of the development of algebra.

Contents and treatment are fresh and very different from the standard treatments Presents a fully constructive version of what it means to do algebra The exposition is not only clear, it is friendly, philosophical, and considerate even to the most naive or inexperienced reader

This book provides a broad, interdisciplinary overview of non-Archimedean analysis and its applications. Featuring new techniques developed by leading experts in the field, it highlights the relevance and depth of this important area of mathematics, in particular its expanding reach into the physical, biological, social, and computational sciences as well as engineering and technology. In the last forty years the connections between non-Archimedean mathematics and disciplines such as physics, biology, economics and engineering, have received considerable attention. Ultrametric spaces appear naturally in models where hierarchy plays a central role - a phenomenon known as ultrametricity. In the 80s, the idea of using ultrametric spaces to describe the states of complex systems, with a natural hierarchical structure, emerged in the works of Fraunfelder, Parisi, Stein and others. A central paradigm in the physics of certain complex systems - for instance, proteins - asserts that the dynamics of such a system can be modeled as a random walk on the energy landscape of the system. To construct mathematical models, the energy landscape is approximated by an ultrametric space (a finite rooted tree), and then the dynamics of the system is modeled as a random walk on the leaves of a finite tree. In the same decade, Volovich proposed using ultrametric spaces in physical models dealing with very short distances. This conjecture has led to a large body of research in quantum field theory and string theory. In economics, the non-Archimedean utility theory uses probability measures with values in ordered non-Archimedean fields. Ultrametric spaces are also vital in classification and clustering techniques. Currently, researchers are actively investigating the following areas: p-adic dynamical systems, p-adic techniques in cryptography, p-adic reaction-diffusion equations and biological models, p-adic models in geophysics, stochastic processes in ultrametric spaces, applications of ultrametric spaces in data processing, and more. This contributed volume gathers the latest theoretical developments as well as state-of-the art applications of non-Archimedean analysis. It covers non-Archimedean and non-commutative geometry, renormalization, p-adic quantum field theory and p-adic quantum mechanics, as well as p-adic string theory and p-adic dynamics. Further topics include ultrametric bioinformation, cryptography and bioinformatics in p-adic settings, non-Archimedean spacetime, gravity and cosmology, p-adic methods in spin glasses, and non-Archimedean analysis of mental spaces. By doing so, it highlights new avenues of research in the mathematical sciences, biosciences and computational sciences.

Galois theory has such close analogies with the theory of coverings that algebraists use a geometric language to speak of field extensions, while topologists speak of "Galois coverings". This book endeavors to develop these theories in a parallel way, starting with that of coverings, which better allows the reader to make images. The authors chose a plan that emphasizes this parallelism. The intention is to allow to transfer to the algebraic framework of Galois theory the geometric intuition that one can have in the context of coverings. This book is aimed at graduate students and mathematicians curious about a non-exclusively algebraic view of Galois theory.