... a major contribution to the world of science and of particular value to the documention of the culture of Islam. N Gedal

... a masterly account of the way in which art and science are combined into aesthetic beauty by the Islamic geometric designs and motifs which decorate much of the Eastern World. M Evans

... This book will allow readers to travel through time and space, from ancient ornaments to the most modern computer graphics patterns. C. Pickover

Ever since the discovery of the existence of seventeen space groups in two dimensions by Fedorov in 1891, it has been speculated that all seventeen could be found in Islamic art. But it is in this book that this remarkable fact is for the first time detailed and analysed, with beautiful illustrations. Rarely is there such a thought-provoking blend of esthetics and geometry with abstraction. C N Yang

Geometrical form. Here, mathematics combines with art and exhibits clearly its aesthetic appeal Islamic patterns provide a marvellous illustration of symmetry and Drs. Abas and Salman perform a useful service by taking this as their theme and blending it with ideas on computer graphics. Foreword by Michael Atiyah

Abas and Salman have assembled a fascinating collection that combines art, history, culture, science, mathematics and philosophy. Their examples range from a 12th-century minaret in Uzbekistan via the Alhambra in Granada to modern computer graphics of Koranic calligraphy on dodecahedrons and tori. They conclude by speculating on the prospect of creating Islamic patterns in virtual reality, where 'a seeker after unity in science and art would be able to submerge himself or herself in exquisite Alhambras of the mind'.Judging by the evidence presented here, it would be an unforgettable experience. New Scientist, (UK)

Cinderella ist eine einzigartige, technisch ausgereifte interaktive Geometrie-Lernsoftware, die sich ausgezeichnet fA1/4r Studenten zum Erlernen der Euklidischen, projektiven, sphArischen und hyperbolischen Geometrie eignet. Aufgrund seines leistungsfAhigen mathematischen Kerns kann Cinderella jedoch ebenfalls als Werkzeug fA1/4r Wissenschaftler in der Forschung auf dem Gebiet der Geometrie und KomplexitAtstheorie Anwendung finden. Die Software enthAlt einen eingebauten automatischen Beweiser fA1/4r geometrische SAtze. Durch eine einfache Exportfunktion kann Cinderella als Werkzeug zum Gestalten von WWW-Seiten oder als Hilfe bei der Ausarbeitung interaktiver Geometrie-BA1/4cher genutzt werden.

Concepts and methods of fractal geometry penetrate various branches of human knowledge to an increasing degree. This tendency is particularly striking in the geosciences, because many processes occurring in and on the Earth result in time dependences and spatial patterns that have a fractal character. The contributions in this volume arose from the "3rd International Symposium on Fractals and Dynamic Systems in Geosciences," held at Stara Lesna, Slovakia in June, 1997. The volume contains new ideas and applications of fractal geometry in such diverse branches of geoscience as engineering geology, the physics of the lithosphere (including faulting, seismicity, and fluid flow), and climate behavior.

A conversation between Euclid and the ghost of Socrates. . . the paths of the moon and the sun charted by the stone-builders of ancient Europe. . .the Greek ideal of the golden mean by which they measured beauty. . . Combining historical fact with a retelling of ancient myths and legends, this lively and engaging book describes the historical, religious and geographical background that gave rise to mathematics in ancient Egypt, Babylon, China, Greece, India, and the Arab world. Each chapter contains a case study where mathematics is applied to the problems of the era, including the area of triangles and volume of the Egyptian pyramids; the Babylonian sexagesimal number system and our present measure of space and time which grew out of it; the use of the abacus and remainder theory in China; the invention of trigonometry by Arab mathematicians; and the solution of quadratic equations by completing the square developed in India. These insightful commentaries will give mathematicians and general historians a better understanding of why and how mathematics arose from the problems of everyday life, while the author's easy, accessible writing style will open fascinating chapters in the history of mathematics to a wide audience of general readers.

This volume of original research papers from the Israeli GAFA seminar during the years 1996-2000 not only reports on more traditional directions of Geometric Functional Analysis, but also reflects on some of the recent new trends in Banach Space Theory and related topics. These include the tighter connection with convexity and the resulting added emphasis on convex bodies that are not necessarily centrally symmetric, and the treatment of bodies which have only very weak convex-like structure. Another topic represented here is the use of new probabilistic tools; in particular transportation of measure methods and new inequalities emerging from Poincaré-like inequalities.

Based on a lecture course, this text gives a rigorous introduction to nonlinear analysis, dynamical systems and bifurcation theory including catastrophe theory. Wherever appropriate it emphasizes a geometrical or coordinate-free approach allowing a clear focus on the essential mathematical structures. It brings out features common to different branches of the subject while giving ample references for more advanced or technical developments.

The book lays algebraic foundations for real geometry through a systematic investigation of partially ordered rings of semi-algebraic functions. Real spectra serve as primary geometric objects, the maps between them are determined by rings of functions associated with the spectra. The many different possible choices for these rings of functions are studied via reflections of partially ordered rings. Readers should feel comfortable using basic algebraic and categorical concepts. As motivational background some familiarity with real geometry will be helpful. The book aims at researchers and graduate students with an interest in real algebra and geometry, ordered algebraic structures, topology and rings of continuous functions.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Automated Deduction in Geometry, ADG'98, held in Beijing, China in August 1998. The 14 revised papers presented were selected from the papers accepted for the workshop after careful reviewing. The papers address all current issues in the area, in particular automated geometry theorem proving, automated geometry problem solving, plane Euclidean reasoning, Clifford algebraic methods for geometric reasoning, decomposing algebraic varieties, applciations in computer vision, mechanical CAGD, etc.

Developed and class-tested by a distinguished team of authors at two universities, this text is intended for courses in nonlinear dynamics in either mathematics or physics. The only prerequisites are calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra. Along with discussions of the major topics, including discrete dynamical systems, chaos, fractals, nonlinear differential equations and bifurcations, the text also includes Lab Visits -- short reports that illustrate relevant concepts from the physical, chemical and biological sciences. There are Computer Experiments throughout the text that present opportunities to explore dynamics through computer simulations, designed for use with any software package. And each chapter ends with a Challenge, guiding students through an advanced topic in the form of an extended exercise.

Questions that arose from linear programming and combinatorial optimization have been a driving force for modern polytope theory, such as the diameter questions motivated by the desire to understand the complexity of the simplex algorithm, or the need to study facets for use in cutting plane procedures. In addition, algorithms now provide the means to computationally study polytopes, to compute their parameters such as flag vectors, graphs and volumes, and to construct examples of large complexity. The papers of this volume thus display a wide panorama of connections of polytope theory with other fields. Areas such as discrete and computational geometry, linear and combinatorial optimization, and scientific computing have contributed a combination of questions, ideas, results, algorithms and, finally, computer programs.

Time-evolution in low-dimensional topological spaces is a subject of puzzling vitality. This book is a state-of-the-art account, covering classical and new results. The volume comprises Poincar -Bendixson, local and Morse-Smale theories, as well as a carefully written chapter on the invariants of surface flows. Of particular interest are chapters on the Anosov-Weil problem, C*-algebras and non-compact surfaces. The book invites graduate students and non-specialists to a fascinating realm of research. It is a valuable source of reference to the specialists.

This volume consists of those papers presented at the Japan Conference on Discrete and Computational Geometry '98. The conference was held 9-12 - cember 1998 at Tokai University in Tokyo. Close to a hundred participants from 10 countries participated. Interest in Computational Geometry surfaced among engineers in Japan - out twenty years ago, while interest in Discrete Geometry arose as a natural extension of the research of a group of graph theorists more recently. One of the goals of the conference was to bring together these two groups and to put them in contact with experts in these ?elds from abroad. This is the second conference in the series. The plan is to hold one every year and to publish the papers of the conferences every two years. The organizers thank the sponsors of the conference, namely, The Institute of Educational Development of Tokai University, Grant-in-Aid of the Ministry of Education of Japan (A.Saito;(A)10304008), Mitsubishi Research Institute, Sanada Institute of System Development, Japan Process, and Upward. They also thank especially T. Asano, D. Avis, V. Chv atal, H. Imai, J. Pach, D. R- paport, M. Ruiz, J. O'Rourke, K. Sugihara, T. Tokuyama, and J. Urrutia for their interest and support."

Historically, science has strived to reduced complex problems to its simplest components, but more recently, it has recognized the merit of studying complex phenomena in situ. Fractal geometry is one such appealing approach, and this book discusses their application to complex problems in molecular biophysics. It provides a detailed, unified treatment of fractal aspects of protein and structure dynamics, fractal reaction kinetics in biochemical systems, sequence correlations in DNA and proteins, and descriptors of chaos in enzymatic systems. In an area that has been slow to acknowledge the use of fractals, this is an important addition to the literature, offering a glimpse of the wealth of possible applications. application to complex problems

From the reviews: "This is an excellent exposition about abelian Reidemeister torsions for three-manifolds." -Zentralblatt Math

"This monograph contains a wealth of information many topologists will find very handy. ...Many of the new points of view pioneered by Turaev are gradually becoming mainstream and are spreading beyond the pure topology world. This monograph is a timely and very useful addition to the scientific literature." -Mathematical Reviews

The world is full of objects, many of which are visible to us as surfaces. Examples are people, cars, machines, computers and bananas. Exceptions are such things as clouds and trees, which have a more detailed, fuzzy structure. Computer vision aims to detect and reconstruct features of surfaces from the images produced by cameras, in some ways mimicking the way in which humans reconstruct features of the world around them by using their eyes. This book describes how the 3D shape of surfaces can be recovered from image sequences of outlines. Cipolla and Giblin provide all the necessary background in differential geometry (assuming knowledge of elementary algebra and calculus) and in the analysis of visual motion, and emphasizes intuitive visual understanding of the geometric techniques with computer-generated illustrations. They also give a thorough introduction to the mathematical techniques and the details of the implementations, and apply the methods to data from real images.

In this study extending classical Markov chain theory to handle fluctuating transition matrices, the author develops a theory of Markov set-chains and provides numerous examples showing how that theory can be applied. Chapters are concluded with a discussion of related research. Readers who can benefit from this monograph are those interested in, or involved with, systems whose data is imprecise or that fluctuate with time. A background equivalent to a course in linear algebra and one in probability theory should be sufficient.

This is the softcover reprint of the 1974 English translation of the later chapters of Bourbaki 's Topologie Generale. Initial chapters study subgroups and quotients of R, real vector spaces and projective spaces, and additive groups Rn. Analogous properties are then studied for complex numbers. Later chapters illustrate the use of real numbers in general topology and discuss various topologies of function spaces and approximation of functions.

These proceedings contain papers presented at the 8th Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery conference, held 17-19, March 1999 at ESIEE, Marne-la- Vall ee. The domains of discrete geometry and computer imagery are closely related. Discrete geometry provides both theoretical and algorithmic models for the p- cessing, analysis and synthesis of images; in return computer imagery, in its variety of applications, constitutes a remarkable experimentational eld and is a source of challenging problems. The number of returning participants, the arrival each year of contributions from new laboratories and new researchers, as well as the quality and originality of the results have contributed to the success of the conference and are an - dication of the dynamism of this eld. The DGCI has become one of the major conferences related to this topic, including participating researchers and la- ratories from all over the world. Of the 41 papers received this year, 24 have been selected for presentation and 7 for poster sessions. In addition to these, four invited speakers have contributed to the conference. The site of Marne-la-Vall ee, just 20 min away from Paris, is particularly we- suited to hold the conference. Indeed, as a newly built city, it showcases a great amount of modern creative architecture, whose pure lines and original shapes o er a favorable context for the topic of Geometry.

The main purpose of this book is to present the basic theory and some recent de velopments concerning the Cauchy problem for higher order abstract differential equations u(n)(t) + ~ AiU(i)(t) = 0, t ~ 0, { U(k)(O) = Uk, 0 ~ k ~ n-l. where AQ, Ab . . . , A - are linear operators in a topological vector space E. n 1 Many problems in nature can be modeled as (ACP ). For example, many n initial value or initial-boundary value problems for partial differential equations, stemmed from mechanics, physics, engineering, control theory, etc. , can be trans lated into this form by regarding the partial differential operators in the space variables as operators Ai (0 ~ i ~ n - 1) in some function space E and letting the boundary conditions (if any) be absorbed into the definition of the space E or of the domain of Ai (this idea of treating initial value or initial-boundary value problems was discovered independently by E. Hille and K. Yosida in the forties). The theory of (ACP ) is closely connected with many other branches of n mathematics. Therefore, the study of (ACPn) is important for both theoretical investigations and practical applications. Over the past half a century, (ACP ) has been studied extensively.

From the reviews: "... The book under review consists of two monographs on geometric aspects of group theory ... Together, these two articles form a wide-ranging survey of combinatorial group theory, with emphasis very much on the geometric roots of the subject. This will be a useful reference work for the expert, as well as providing an overview of the subject for the outsider or novice. Many different topics are described and explored, with the main results presented but not proved. This allows the interested reader to get the flavour of these topics without becoming bogged down in detail. Both articles give comprehensive bibliographies, so that it is possible to use this book as the starting point for a more detailed study of a particular topic of interest. ..." Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, 1996

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and revised post-workshop proceedings of the International Workshop on Automated Deduction in Geometry, held in Toulouse, France, in September 1996. The revised extended papers accepted for inclusion in the volume were selected on the basis of double reviewing. Among the topics covered are automated geometric reasoning and the deduction applied to Dixon resultants, Grobner bases, characteristic sets, computational geometry, algebraic geometry, and planet motion; furthermore the system REDLOG is demonstrated and the verification of geometric statements as well as the automated production of proof in Euclidean Geometry are present.

In recent years geometry seems to have lost large parts of its former central position in mathematics teaching in most countries. However, new trends have begun to counteract this tendency. There is an increasing awareness that geometry plays a key role in mathematics and learning mathematics. Although geometry has been eclipsed in the mathematics curriculum, research in geometry has blossomed as new ideas have arisen from inside mathematics and other disciplines, including computer science. Due to reassessment of the role of geometry, mathematics educators and mathematicians face new challenges. In the present ICMI study, the whole spectrum of teaching and learning of geometry is analysed. Experts from all over the world took part in this study, which was conducted on the basis of recent international research, case studies, and reports on actual school practice. This book will be of particular interest to mathematics educators and mathematicians who are involved in the teaching of geometry at all educational levels, as well as to researchers in mathematics education.

Interest in the study of geometry is currently enjoying a resurgence-understandably so, as the study of curves was once the playground of some very great mathematicians. However, many of the subject's more exciting aspects require a somewhat advanced mathematics background. For the "fun stuff" to be accessible, we need to offer students an introduction with modest prerequisites, one that stimulates their interest and focuses on problem solving.

Integrating parametric, algebraic, and projective curves into a single text, Geometry of Curves offers students a unique approach that provides a mathematical structure for solving problems, not just a catalog of theorems. The author begins with the basics, then takes students on a fascinating journey from conics, higher algebraic and transcendental curves, through the properties of parametric curves, the classification of limaçons, envelopes, and finally to projective curves, their relationship to algebraic curves, and their application to asymptotes and boundedness.

The uniqueness of this treatment lies in its integration of the different types of curves, its use of analytic methods, and its generous number of examples, exercises, and illustrations.
The result is a practical text, almost entirely self-contained, that not only imparts a deeper understanding of the theory, but inspires a heightened appreciation of geometry and interest in more advanced studies.

UNDERSTANDING NONLINEAR DYNAMICS is based on an undergraduate course taught for many years to students in the biological sciences. The text provides a clear and accessible development of many concepts from contemporary dynamics, including stability and multistability, cellular automata and excitable media, fractals, cycles, and chaos. A chapter on time-series analysis builds on this foundation to provide an introduction to techniques for extracting information about dynamics from data. The text will be useful for courses offered in the life sciences or other applied science programs, or as a supplement to emphasize the application of subjects presented in mathematics or physics courses. Extensive examples are derived from the experimental literature, and numerous exercise sets can be used in teaching basic mathematical concepts and their applications. Concrete applications of the mathematics are illustrated in such areas as biochemistry, neurophysiology, cardiology, and ecology. The text also provides an entry point for researchers not familiar with mathematics but interested in applications of nonlinear dynamics to the life sciences.