This volume is based on lectures given at the highly successful three-week Summer School on Geometry, Topology and Dynamics of Character Varieties held at the National University of Singapore's Institute for Mathematical Sciences in July 2010.Aimed at graduate students in the early stages of research, the edited and refereed articles comprise an excellent introduction to the subject of the program, much of which is otherwise available only in specialized texts. Topics include hyperbolic structures on surfaces and their degenerations, applications of ping-pong lemmas in various contexts, introductions to Lorenzian and complex hyperbolic geometry, and representation varieties of surface groups into PSL(2, ) and other semi-simple Lie groups. This volume will serve as a useful portal to students and researchers in a vibrant and multi-faceted area of mathematics.

Finite arrangements of convex bodies were intensively investigated in the second half of the twentieth century. Connections to many other subjects were made, including crystallography, the local theory of Banach spaces, and combinatorial optimisation. This book, the first one dedicated solely to the subject, provides an in-depth state-of-the-art discussion of the theory of finite packings and coverings by convex bodies. It contains various new results and arguments, besides collecting those scattered around in the literature, and provides a comprehensive treatment of problems whose interplay was not clearly understood before. In order to make the material more accessible, each chapter is essentially independent, and two-dimensional and higher-dimensional arrangements are discussed separately. Arrangements of congruent convex bodies in Euclidean space are discussed, and the density of finite packing and covering by balls in Euclidean, spherical and hyperbolic spaces is considered.

This textbook for courses on function data analysis and shape data analysis describes how to define, compare, and mathematically represent shapes, with a focus on statistical modeling and inference. It is aimed at graduate students in analysis in statistics, engineering, applied mathematics, neuroscience, biology, bioinformatics, and other related areas. The interdisciplinary nature of the broad range of ideas covered-from introductory theory to algorithmic implementations and some statistical case studies-is meant to familiarize graduate students with an array of tools that are relevant in developing computational solutions for shape and related analyses. These tools, gleaned from geometry, algebra, statistics, and computational science, are traditionally scattered across different courses, departments, and disciplines; Functional and Shape Data Analysis offers a unified, comprehensive solution by integrating the registration problem into shape analysis, better preparing graduate students for handling future scientific challenges. Recently, a data-driven and application-oriented focus on shape analysis has been trending. This text offers a self-contained treatment of this new generation of methods in shape analysis of curves. Its main focus is shape analysis of functions and curves-in one, two, and higher dimensions-both closed and open. It develops elegant Riemannian frameworks that provide both quantification of shape differences and registration of curves at the same time. Additionally, these methods are used for statistically summarizing given curve data, performing dimension reduction, and modeling observed variability. It is recommended that the reader have a background in calculus, linear algebra, numerical analysis, and computation.

This accessible introduction to harmonic map theory and its analytical aspects, covers recent developments in the regularity theory of weakly harmonic maps. The book begins by introducing these concepts, stressing the interplay between geometry, the role of symmetries and weak solutions. It then presents a guided tour into the theory of completely integrable systems for harmonic maps, followed by two chapters devoted to recent results on the regularity of weak solutions. A presentation of "exotic" functional spaces from the theory of harmonic analysis is given and these tools are then used for proving regularity results. The importance of conservation laws is stressed and the concept of a "Coulomb moving frame" is explained in detail. The book ends with further applications and illustrations of Coulomb moving frames to the theory of surfaces.

The work shows the fascination of topology- and geometry-governed properties of self-rolled micro- and nanoarchitectures. The author provides an in-depth representation of the advanced theoretical and numerical models for analyzing key effects, which underlie engineering of transport, superconducting and optical properties of micro- and nanoarchitectures.

Just 23 years ago Benoit Mandelbrot published his famous picture of the Mandelbrot set, but that picture has changed our view of the mathematical and physical universe. In this text, Mandelbrot offers 25 papers from the past 25 years, many related to the famous inkblot figure. Of historical interest are some early images of this fractal object produced with a crude dot-matrix printer. The text includes some items not previously published.

The aim of this book is to examine the geometry of our world and, by blending theory with a variety of every-day examples, to stimulate the imagination of the readers and develop their geometric intuition. It tries to recapture the excitement that surrounded geometry during the Renaissance as the development of perspective drawing gathered pace, or more recently as engineers sought to show that all the world was a machine. The same excitement is here still, as enquiring minds today puzzle over a random-dot stereogram or the interpretation of an image painstakingly transmitted from Jupiter.The book will give a solid foundation for a variety of undergraduate courses, to provide a basis for a geometric component of graduate teacher training, and to provide background for those who work in computer graphics and scene analysis. It begins with a self-contained development of the geometry of extended Euclidean space. This framework is then used to systematically clarify and develop the art of perspective drawing and its converse discipline of scene analysis and to analyze the behavior of bar-and-joint mechanisms and hinged-panel mechanisms. Spherical polyhedra are introduced and scene analysis is applied to drawings of these and associated objects. The book concludes by showing how a natural relaxation of the axioms developed in the early chapters leads to the concept of a matroid and briefly examines some of the attractive properties of these natural structures.

See also GEOMETRIC MECHANICS - Part I: Dynamics and Symmetry (2nd Edition) This textbook introduces modern geometric mechanics to advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students in mathematics, physics and engineering. In particular, it explains the dynamics of rotating, spinning and rolling rigid bodies from a geometric viewpoint by formulating their solutions as coadjoint motions generated by Lie groups. The only prerequisites are linear algebra, multivariable calculus and some familiarity with Euler-Lagrange variational principles and canonical Poisson brackets in classical mechanics at the beginning undergraduate level.The book uses familiar concrete examples to explain variational calculus on tangent spaces of Lie groups. Through these examples, the student develops skills in performing computational manipulations, starting from vectors and matrices, working through the theory of quaternions to understand rotations, then transferring these skills to the computation of more abstract adjoint and coadjoint motions, Lie-Poisson Hamiltonian formulations, momentum maps and finally dynamics with nonholonomic constraints.The organisation of the first edition has been preserved in the second edition. However, the substance of the text has been rewritten throughout to improve the flow and to enrich the development of the material. Many worked examples of adjoint and coadjoint actions of Lie groups on smooth manifolds have also been added and the enhanced coursework examples have been expanded. The second edition is ideal for classroom use, student projects and self-study.

See also GEOMETRIC MECHANICS - Part I: Dynamics and Symmetry (2nd Edition) This textbook introduces modern geometric mechanics to advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students in mathematics, physics and engineering. In particular, it explains the dynamics of rotating, spinning and rolling rigid bodies from a geometric viewpoint by formulating their solutions as coadjoint motions generated by Lie groups. The only prerequisites are linear algebra, multivariable calculus and some familiarity with Euler-Lagrange variational principles and canonical Poisson brackets in classical mechanics at the beginning undergraduate level.The book uses familiar concrete examples to explain variational calculus on tangent spaces of Lie groups. Through these examples, the student develops skills in performing computational manipulations, starting from vectors and matrices, working through the theory of quaternions to understand rotations, then transferring these skills to the computation of more abstract adjoint and coadjoint motions, Lie-Poisson Hamiltonian formulations, momentum maps and finally dynamics with nonholonomic constraints.The organisation of the first edition has been preserved in the second edition. However, the substance of the text has been rewritten throughout to improve the flow and to enrich the development of the material. Many worked examples of adjoint and coadjoint actions of Lie groups on smooth manifolds have also been added and the enhanced coursework examples have been expanded. The second edition is ideal for classroom use, student projects and self-study.

This volume contains contributions of principal speakers of the symposium on geometry and analysis of automorphic forms of several variables, held in September 2009 at Tokyo, Japan, in honor of Takayuki Oda's 60th birthday. It presents both research and survey articles in the fields that are the main themes of his work. The volume may serve as a guide to developing areas as well as a resource for researchers who seek a broader view and for students who are beginning to explore automorphic form.

The aim of the book is to provide a new and fruitful approach to the challenging problems of modern physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. The well-known observations of the flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies and of the gravitational lensing effect greatly exceeding the expectations based on the classical GRT can be explained without bringing in the notion of dark matter. The Tully-Fisher law and the unusual features of globular clusters' motion become clear. It also turns out that new features appear in the cosmological picture that involves the Universe expansion and the acceleration of the latter. The theory and the first observational results of the specific galactic scale experiment based on the optical-metrical parametric resonance are also discussed in the book. Instead of the direct measurements of the extremely small gravitational waves, it appears sufficient just to register their action on the radiation of the space masers. It can be done for special cases when the source of the gravitational wave is strictly periodic and presents a close binary system. When the amount of data obtained in such observations is large enough, it would be possible to judge upon the geometrical properties of the space-time region enveloping our galaxy, the Milky Way. The foundations of the new approach stem from the equivalence principle which is the basics of the classical GRT. In order to make the presentation self-contained, the roots of century-old ideas are discussed again. This makes the book interesting not only to the specialists in the field but also to graduates and ambitious undergraduate students.

This volume focuses on the interactions between mathematics, physics, biology and neuroscience by exploring new geometrical and topological modeling in these fields. Among the highlights are the central roles played by multilevel and scale-change approaches in these disciplines.

The integration of mathematics with physics, molecular and cell biology, and the neurosciences, will constitute the new frontier and challenge for 21st century science, where breakthroughs are more likely to span across traditional disciplines.

This book investigates the high degree of symmetry that lies hidden in integrable systems. To that end, differential equations arising from classical mechanics, such as the KdV equation and the KP equations, are used here by the authors to introduce the notion of an infinite dimensional transformation group acting on spaces of integrable systems. Chapters discuss the work of M. Sato on the algebraic structure of completely integrable systems, together with developments of these ideas in the work of M. Kashiwara. The text should be accessible to anyone with a knowledge of differential and integral calculus and elementary complex analysis, and it will be a valuable resource to both novice and expert alike.

This book describes the global properties of simply-connected spaces that are non-positively curved in the sense of A. D. Alexandrov, and the structure of groups which act on such spaces by isometries. The theory of these objects is developed in a manner accessible to anyone familiar with the rudiments of topology and group theory: non-trivial theorems are proved by concatenating elementary geometric arguments, and many examples are given. Part I is an introduction to the geometry of geodesic spaces. In Part II the basic theory of spaces with upper curvature bounds is developed. More specialized topics, such as complexes of groups, are covered in Part III. The book is divided into three parts, each part is divided into chapters and the chapters have various subheadings. The chapters in Part III are longer and for ease of reference are divided into numbered sections.

Geometry processing, or mesh processing, is a fast-growing area of research that uses concepts from applied mathematics, computer science, and engineering to design efficient algorithms for the acquisition, reconstruction, analysis, manipulation, simulation, and transmission of complex 3D models. Applications of geometry processing algorithms already cover a wide range of areas from multimedia, entertainment, and classical computer-aided design, to biomedical computing, reverse engineering, and scientific computing.

Over the last several years, triangle meshes have become increasingly popular, as irregular triangle meshes have developed into a valuable alternative to traditional spline surfaces. This book discusses the whole geometry processing pipeline based on triangle meshes. The pipeline starts with data input, for example, a model acquired by 3D scanning techniques. This data can then go through processes of error removal, mesh creation, smoothing, conversion, morphing, and more. The authors detail techniques for those processes using triangle meshes. A supplemental website contains downloads and additional information.

Most books on fractals focus on deterministic fractals as the impact of incorporating randomness and time is almost absent. Further, most review fractals without explaining what scaling and self-similarity means. This book introduces the idea of scaling, self-similarity, scale-invariance and their role in the dimensional analysis. For the first time, fractals emphasizing mostly on stochastic fractal, and multifractals which evolves with time instead of scale-free self-similarity, are discussed. Moreover, it looks at power laws and dynamic scaling laws in some detail and provides an overview of modern statistical tools for calculating fractal dimension and multifractal spectrum.

Combinatorics of Spreads and Parallelisms covers all known finite and infinite parallelisms as well as the planes comprising them. It also presents a complete analysis of general spreads and partitions of vector spaces that provide groups enabling the construction of subgeometry partitions of projective spaces. The book describes general partitions of finite and infinite vector spaces, including Sperner spaces, focal-spreads, and their associated geometries. Since retraction groups provide quasi-subgeometry and subgeometry partitions of projective spaces, the author thoroughly discusses subgeometry partitions and their construction methods. He also features focal-spreads as partitions of vector spaces by subspaces. In addition to presenting many new examples of finite and infinite parallelisms, the book shows that doubly transitive or transitive t-parallelisms cannot exist unless the parallelism is a line parallelism. Along with the author's other three books (Subplane Covered Nets, Foundations of Translation Planes, Handbook of Finite Translation Planes), this text forms a solid, comprehensive account of the complete theory of the geometries that are connected with translation planes in intricate ways. It explores how to construct interesting parallelisms and how general spreads of vector spaces are used to study and construct subgeometry partitions of projective spaces.

The tensorial nature of a quantity permits us to formulate transformation rules for its components under a change of basis. These rules are relatively simple and easily grasped by any engineering student familiar with matrix operators in linear algebra. More complex problems arise when one considers the tensor fields that describe continuum bodies. In this case general curvilinear coordinates become necessary. The principal basis of a curvilinear system is constructed as a set of vectors tangent to the coordinate lines. Another basis, called the dual basis, is also constructed in a special manner. The existence of these two bases is responsible for the mysterious covariant and contravariant terminology encountered in tensor discussions.A tensor field is a tensor-valued function of position in space. The use of tensor fields allows us to present physical laws in a clear, compact form. A byproduct is a set of simple and clear rules for the representation of vector differential operators such as gradient, divergence, and Laplacian in curvilinear coordinate systems.This book is a clear, concise, and self-contained treatment of tensors, tensor fields, and their applications. The book contains practically all the material on tensors needed for applications. It shows how this material is applied in mechanics, covering the foundations of the linear theories of elasticity and elastic shells.The main results are all presented in the first four chapters. The remainder of the book shows how one can apply these results to differential geometry and the study of various types of objects in continuum mechanics such as elastic bodies, plates, and shells. Each chapter of this new edition is supplied with exercises and problems - most with solutions, hints, or answers to help the reader progress. An extended appendix serves as a handbook-style summary of all important formulas contained in the book.

This book contains a selection of classical mathematical papers related to fractal geometry. It is intended for the convenience of the student or scholar wishing to learn about fractal geometry.

The tensorial nature of a quantity permits us to formulate transformation rules for its components under a change of basis. These rules are relatively simple and easily grasped by any engineering student familiar with matrix operators in linear algebra. More complex problems arise when one considers the tensor fields that describe continuum bodies. In this case general curvilinear coordinates become necessary. The principal basis of a curvilinear system is constructed as a set of vectors tangent to the coordinate lines. Another basis, called the dual basis, is also constructed in a special manner. The existence of these two bases is responsible for the mysterious covariant and contravariant terminology encountered in tensor discussions.A tensor field is a tensor-valued function of position in space. The use of tensor fields allows us to present physical laws in a clear, compact form. A byproduct is a set of simple and clear rules for the representation of vector differential operators such as gradient, divergence, and Laplacian in curvilinear coordinate systems.This book is a clear, concise, and self-contained treatment of tensors, tensor fields, and their applications. The book contains practically all the material on tensors needed for applications. It shows how this material is applied in mechanics, covering the foundations of the linear theories of elasticity and elastic shells.The main results are all presented in the first four chapters. The remainder of the book shows how one can apply these results to differential geometry and the study of various types of objects in continuum mechanics such as elastic bodies, plates, and shells. Each chapter of this new edition is supplied with exercises and problems - most with solutions, hints, or answers to help the reader progress. An extended appendix serves as a handbook-style summary of all important formulas contained in the book.

This book covers the basic topics in geometry (including trigonometry) that are accessible and valuable to senior high school and university students. It also includes material that are very useful for problem solving in mathematical competitions, from relatively easy to advanced levels, including the International Mathematical Olympiad.

This book covers the basic topics in geometry (including trigonometry) that are accessible and valuable to senior high school and university students. It also includes materials that are very useful for problem solving in mathematical competitions, from relatively easy to advanced levels, including the International Mathematical Olympiad.

This book aims to propose implementations and applications of Fractional Order Systems (FOS). It is well known that FOS can be applied in control applications and systems modeling, and their effectiveness has been proven in many theoretical works and simulation routines. A further and mandatory step for FOS real world utilization is their hardware implementation and applications on real systems modeling. With this viewpoint, introductive chapters on FOS are included, on the definition of stability region of Fractional Order PID Controller and Chaotic FOS, followed by the practical implementation based on Microcontroller, Field Programmable Gate Array, Field Programmable Analog Array and Switched Capacitor. Another section is dedicated to FO modeling of Ionic Polymeric Metal Composite (IPMC). This new material may have applications in robotics, aerospace and biomedicine.

Convex geometry is at once simple and amazingly rich. While the classical results go back many decades, during that previous to this book's publication in 1999, the integral geometry of convex bodies had undergone a dramatic revitalization, brought about by the introduction of methods, results and, most importantly, new viewpoints, from probability theory, harmonic analysis and the geometry of finite-dimensional normed spaces. This book is a collection of research and expository articles on convex geometry and probability, suitable for researchers and graduate students in several branches of mathematics coming under the broad heading of 'Geometric Functional Analysis'. It continues the Israel GAFA Seminar series, which is widely recognized as the most useful research source in the area. The collection reflects the work done at the program in Convex Geometry and Geometric Analysis that took place at MSRI in 1996.