This book is a holistic and self-contained treatment of the analysis and numerics of random differential equations from a problem-centred point of view. An interdisciplinary approach is applied by considering state-of-the-art concepts of both dynamical systems and scientific computing. The red line pervading this book is the two-fold reduction of a random partial differential equation disturbed by some external force as present in many important applications in science and engineering. First, the random partial differential equation is reduced to a set of random ordinary differential equations in the spirit of the method of lines. These are then further reduced to a family of (deterministic) ordinary differential equations. The monograph will be of benefit, not only to mathematicians, but can also be used for interdisciplinary courses in informatics and engineering.

On the occasion of the retirement of Wolfram Pohlers the Institut fur Mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung of the University of Munster organized a colloquium and a workshop which took place July 17 - 19, 2008. This event brought together proof theorists from many parts of the world who have been acting as teachers, students and collaborators of Wolfram Pohlers and who have been shaping the field of proof theory over the years. The present volume collects papers by the speakers of the colloquium and workshop; and they produce a documentation of the state of the art of contemporary proof theory.

This book will serve as a valuable source of information about triangulations for the graduate student and researcher. With emphasis on computational issues, it presents the basic theory necessary to construct and manipulate triangulations. In particular, the book gives a tour through the theory behind the Delaunay triangulation, including algorithms and software issues. It also discusses various data structures used for the representation of triangulations.

The KK-theory of Kasparov is now approximately twelve years old; its power, utility and importance have been amply demonstrated. Nonethe less, it remains a forbiddingly difficult topic with which to work and learn. There are many reasons for this. For one thing, KK-theory spans several traditionally disparate mathematical regimes. For another, the literature is scattered and difficult to penetrate. Many of the major papers require the reader to supply the details of the arguments based on only a rough outline of proofs. Finally, the subject itself has come to consist of a number of difficult segments, each of which demands prolonged and intensive study. is to deal with some of these difficul Our goal in writing this book ties and make it possible for the reader to "get started" with the theory. We have not attempted to produce a comprehensive treatise on all aspects of KK-theory; the subject seems too vital to submit to such a treatment at this point. What seemed more important to us was a timely presen tation of the very basic elements of the theory, the functoriality of the KK-groups, and the Kasparov product."

This book offers a new conceptual framework for reflecting on the role of information and communication technology in mathematics education. Discussion focuses on how computers, writing and oral discourse transform education at an epistemological as well as a political level. Building on examples, research and theory, the authors propose that knowledge is not constructed solely by humans, but by collectives of humans and technologies of intelligence.

For many years physics and mathematics have had a fruitful influence on one another. Classical mechanics and celestial mechanics have produced very deep problems whose solutions have enhanced mathematics. On the other hand, mathematics itself has found interesting theories which then (sometimes after many years) have been reflected in physics, confirming the thesis that nothing is more practical than a good theory. The same is true for the younger physical discipline -of quantum mechanics. In the 1930s two events, not at all random, became: The mathematical back grounds of both quantum mechanics and probability theory. In 1936, G. Birkhoff and J. von Neumann published their historical paper "The logic of quantum mechanics," in which a quantum logic was suggested. The mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics remains an outstanding problem of mathematics, physics, logic and philosophy even today. The theory of quantum logics is a major stream in this axiomatical knowledge river, where L(H), the system of all closed subspaces of a Hilbert space H, due to J. von Neumann, plays an important role. When A.M. Gleason published his solution to G. Mackey's problem showing that any state (= probability measure) corresponds to a density operator, he probably did not anticipate that his solution would become a cornerstone of ax iomati cal theory of quantum mechanics nor that it would provide many interesting applications to mathematics."

Contents: Equations-solving and Theorems-proving Zero-set Formulation and Ideal Formulation (W-T Wu); Theory of Computation and Complex Analytic Dynamics (C T Chong); Affine Geometry in Complex Function Spaces and Algebras (A J Ellis); Some Results on Chromatically Unique Graphs (K M Koh & C P Teo); On the Decomposition of 0-Simple Dual Semigroups (C K Lai & K P Shum); On the Geometry of Infinite Dimensional Teichmuller Spaces (Z Li); Analytic Functionals and Their Transformations (M Morimoto); Groups and Designs (C E Praeger); Global Small Solutions to Nonlinear Evolution Equations (R Racke); and other papers;

This Seminar began in Moscow in November 1943 and has continued without interruption up to the present. We are happy that with this vol ume, Birkhiiuser has begun to publish papers of talks from the Seminar. It was, unfortunately, difficult to organize their publication before 1990. Since 1990, most of the talks have taken place at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Parallel seminars were also held in Moscow, and during July, 1992, at IRES in Bures-sur-Yvette, France. Speakers were invited to submit papers in their own style, and to elaborate on what they discussed in the Seminar. We hope that readers will find the diversity of styles appealing, and recognize that to some extent this reflects the diversity of styles in a mathematical society. The principal aim was to have interesting talks, even if the topic was not especially popular at the time. The papers listed in the Table of Contents reflect some of the rich variety of ideas presented in the Seminar. Not all the speakers submit ted papers. Among the interesting talks that influenced the seminar in an important way, let us mention, for example, that of R. Langlands on per colation theory and those of J. Conway and J. McKay on sporadic groups. In addition, there were many extemporaneous talks as well as short discus sions."

Contents -
Preface -
1. REVIEW OF BASIC MATERIAL - FUNCTIONS, INEQUALITIES - 2. DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS - 3. INTEGRATION - 4. FUNCTIONS OF MANY VARIABLES; PARTIAL DIFFERENTIATION - 5. VECTORS - 6. SERIES, TAYLOR-MACLAURIN SERIES - 7. COMPLEX NUMBERS - 8. ORTHOGONAL FUNCTIONS AND FOURIER SERIES - 9. DETERMINANTS - 10. MATRICES - 11. DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS - 12. PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS - 13. NUMERICAL METHODS - 14. ELEMENTARY STATISTICS AND ERROR ANALYSIS - Problems for Solution - Bibliography - Answers to Problems - Index

When the 50th anniversary of the birth of Information Theory was celebrated at the 1998 IEEE International Symposium on Informa tion Theory in Boston, there was a great deal of reflection on the the year 1993 as a critical year. As the years pass and more perspec tive is gained, it is a fairly safe bet that we will view 1993 as the year when the "early years" of error control coding came to an end. This was the year in which Berrou, Glavieux and Thitimajshima pre sented "Near Shannon Limit Error-Correcting Coding and Decoding: Turbo Codes" at the International Conference on Communications in Geneva. In their presentation, Berrou et al. claimed that a combi nation of parallel concatenation and iterative decoding can provide reliable communications at a signal to noise ratio that is within a few tenths of a dB of the Shannon limit. Nearly fifty years of striving to achieve the promise of Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem had come to an end. The implications of this result were immediately apparent to all -coding gains on the order of 10 dB could be used to dramatically extend the range of communication receivers, increase data rates and services, or substantially reduce transmitter power levels. The 1993 ICC paper set in motion several research efforts that have permanently changed the way we look at error control coding."

A Volume in International Perspectives on Mathematics Education - Cognition, Equity & Society Series Editor Bharath Sriraman, The University of Montana and Lyn English, Queensland University of Technology This volume represents a serious attempt to understand what it is that structures the pedagogical experience. In that attempt there are two main objectives. One is a theoretical interest that involves examining the issue of the subjectivity of the teacher and exploring how intersubjective negotiations shape the production of classroom practice. A second objective is to apply these understandings to the production of mathematical knowledge and to the construction of identities in actual mathematics classrooms. To that end the book will contain substantial essays that draw on postmodern philosophies of the social to explore theory's relationship with the practice of mathematics pedagogy. Unpacking Pedagogy takes new ideas seriously and engages readers in theory development. Groundbreaking in content, the book investigates how our thinking about classroom practice in general, and mathematics teaching (and learning), in particular, might be transformed. As a key resource for interrogating and understanding classroom life, the book's sophisticated analyses allow readers to build new knowledge about mathematics pedagogy. In turn, that new knowledge will provide them with the tools to engage more actively in educational criticism and to play a role in educational change.

This solutions booklet is a supplement to the text book 'Group Theory in Physics' by Wu-Ki Tung. It will be useful to lecturers and students taking the subject as detailed solutions are given.

Intended for first- or second-year undergraduates, this introduction to discrete mathematics covers the usual topics of such a course, but applies constructivist principles that promote - indeed, require - active participation by the student. Working with the programming language ISETL, whose syntax is close to that of standard mathematical language, the student constructs the concepts in her or his mind as a result of constructing them on the computer in the syntax of ISETL. This dramatically different approach allows students to attempt to discover concepts in a "Socratic" dialog with the computer. The discussion avoids the formal "definition-theorem" approach and promotes active involvement by the reader by its questioning style. An instructor using this text can expect a lively class whose students develop a deep conceptual understanding rather than simply manipulative skills. Topics covered in this book include: the propositional calculus, operations on sets, basic counting methods, predicate calculus, relations, graphs, functions, and mathematical induction.

The recent emergence of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) has led to significant progress in applying texture methods to various computer vision problems and applications. The focus of this research has broadened from 2D textures to 3D textures and spatiotemporal (dynamic) textures. Also, where texture was once utilized for applications such as remote sensing, industrial inspection and biomedical image analysis, the introduction of LBP-based approaches have provided outstanding results in problems relating to face and activity analysis, with future scope for face and facial expression recognition, biometrics, visual surveillance and video analysis.

"Computer Vision Using Local Binary Patterns" provides a detailed description of the LBP methods and their variants both in spatial and spatiotemporal domains. This comprehensive reference also provides an excellent overview as to how texture methods can be utilized for solving different kinds of computer vision and image analysis problems. Source codes of the basic LBP algorithms, demonstrations, some databases and a comprehensive LBP bibliography can be found from an accompanying web site.

Topics include: local binary patterns and their variants in spatial and spatiotemporal domains, texture classification and segmentation, description of interest regions, applications in image retrieval and 3D recognition - Recognition and segmentation of dynamic textures, background subtraction, recognition of actions, face analysis using still images and image sequences, visual speech recognition and LBP in various applications.

Written by pioneers of LBP, this book is an essential resource for researchers, professional engineers and graduate students in computer vision, image analysis and pattern recognition. The book will also be of interest to all those who work with specific applications of machine vision.

Classicalexamples of moreand more oscillatingreal-valued functions on a domain N ?of R are the functions u (x)=sin(nx)with x=(x ,...,x ) or the so-called n 1 1 n n+1 Rademacherfunctionson]0,1[,u (x)=r (x) = sgn(sin(2 ?x))(seelater3.1.4). n n They may appear as the gradients?v of minimizing sequences (v ) in some n n n?N variationalproblems. Intheseexamples,thefunctionu convergesinsomesenseto n ameasure on ? xR, called Young measure. In Functional Analysis formulation, this is the narrow convergence to of the image of the Lebesgue measure on ? by ? ? (?,u (?)). In the disintegrated form ( ) ,the parametrized measure n ? ??? ? captures the possible scattering of the u around ?. n Curiously if (X ) is a sequence of random variables deriving from indep- n n?N dent ones, the n-th one may appear more and more far from the k ?rst ones as 2 if it was oscillating (think of orthonormal vectors in L which converge weakly to 0). More precisely when the laws L(X ) narrowly converge to some probability n measure , it often happens that for any k and any A in the algebra generated by X ,...,X , the conditional law L(X|A) still converges to (see Chapter 9) 1 k n which means 1 ??? C (R) ?(X (?))dP(?)?? ?d b n P(A) A R or equivalently, ? denoting the image of P by ? ? (?,X (?)), n X n (1l ??)d? ?? (1l ??)d[P? ].

This book is one of the first to present a variety of carefully selected cases to describe and analyze in depth and considerable detail assessment in mathematics education in various interesting places in the world. The book is based on work presented at an invited international ICMI seminar and includes contributions from first rate scholars from Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Asia and Oceania, and the Middle East.
The cases presented range from thorough reviews of the state of assessment in mathematics education in selected countries, each possessing archetypical' characteristics of assessment, to innovative or experimental small or large scale assessment initiatives. All the cases presented have been implemented in actual practice.
The book will be particularly stimulating reading for mathematics educators -- at all levels -- who are concerned with the innovation of assessment modes in mathematics education, as well as everybody working in the field of mathematics education: in research and development, in curriculum planning, assessment institutions and agencies, mathematics specialists in ministries, teacher trainers, textbook authors, frontline teachers.