Flatland is a fascinating nineteenth century work - an utterly unique combination of multi-plane geometry, social satire and whimsy. Although its original publication went largely unnoticed, the discoveries of later physicists brought it new recognition and respect, and its popularity since has justly never waned. It remains a charming and entertaining read, and a brilliant introduction to the concept of dimensions beyond those we can perceive. This is a reworking of the expanded 2nd edition of 1884, with particularly large, clear text, and all the original author's illustrations.

This book is an introduction to fiber bundles and fibrations. But the ultimate goal is to make the reader feel comfortable with basic ideas in homotopy theory. The author found that the classification of principal fiber bundles is an ideal motivation for this purpose. The notion of homotopy appears naturally in the classification. Basic tools in homotopy theory such as homotopy groups and their long exact sequence need to be introduced. Furthermore, the notion of fibrations, which is one of three important classes of maps in homotopy theory, can be obtained by extracting the most essential properties of fiber bundles. The book begins with elementary examples and then gradually introduces abstract definitions when necessary. The reader is assumed to be familiar with point-set topology, but it is the only requirement for this book.

Local structures, like differentiable manifolds, fibre bundles, vector bundles and foliations, can be obtained by gluing together a family of suitable 'elementary spaces', by means of partial homeomorphisms that fix the gluing conditions and form a sort of 'intrinsic atlas', instead of the more usual system of charts living in an external framework.An 'intrinsic manifold' is defined here as such an atlas, in a suitable category of elementary spaces: open euclidean spaces, or trivial bundles, or trivial vector bundles, and so on.This uniform approach allows us to move from one basis to another: for instance, the elementary tangent bundle of an open Euclidean space is automatically extended to the tangent bundle of any differentiable manifold. The same holds for tensor calculus.Technically, the goal of this book is to treat these structures as 'symmetric enriched categories' over a suitable basis, generally an ordered category of partial mappings.This approach to gluing structures is related to Ehresmann's one, based on inductive pseudogroups and inductive categories. A second source was the theory of enriched categories and Lawvere's unusual view of interesting mathematical structures as categories enriched over a suitable basis.

Since Benoit Mandelbrot's pioneering work in the late 1970s, scores of research articles and books have been published on the topic of fractals. Despite the volume of literature in the field, the general level of theoretical understanding has remained low; most work is aimed either at too mainstream an audience to achieve any depth or at too specialized a community to achieve widespread use. Written by celebrated mathematician and educator A.A. Kirillov, A Tale of Two Fractals is intended to help bridge this gap, providing an original treatment of fractals that is at once accessible to beginners and sufficiently rigorous for serious mathematicians. The work is designed to give young, non-specialist mathematicians a solid foundation in the theory of fractals, and, in the process, to equip them with exposure to a variety of geometric, analytical, and algebraic tools with applications across other areas.

This book presents material in two parts. Part one provides an introduction to crossed modules of groups, Lie algebras and associative algebras with fully written out proofs and is suitable for graduate students interested in homological algebra. In part two, more advanced and less standard topics such as crossed modules of Hopf algebra, Lie groups, and racks are discussed as well as recent developments and research on crossed modules.

The innovative use of sliceforms to explore the properties of surfaces is produced in a systematic way, providing the tools to build surfaces from paper to explore their mathematics. The extensive commentary explains the mathematics behind particular surfaces: an exercise in practical geometry that will stimulate ideas for the student and the enthusiast, as well as having practical applications in engineering and architecture.

The book contains a detailed treatment of thermodynamic formalism on general compact metrizable spaces. Topological pressure, topological entropy, variational principle, and equilibrium states are presented in detail. Abstract ergodic theory is also given a significant attention. Ergodic theorems, ergodicity, and Kolmogorov-Sinai metric entropy are fully explored. Furthermore, the book gives the reader an opportunity to find rigorous presentation of thermodynamic formalism for distance expanding maps and, in particular, subshifts of finite type over a finite alphabet. It also provides a fairly complete treatment of subshifts of finite type over a countable alphabet. Transfer operators, Gibbs states and equilibrium states are, in this context, introduced and dealt with. Their relations are explored. All of this is applied to fractal geometry centered around various versions of Bowen's formula in the context of expanding conformal repellors, limit sets of conformal iterated function systems and conformal graph directed Markov systems. A unique introduction to iteration of rational functions is given with emphasize on various phenomena caused by rationally indifferent periodic points. Also, a fairly full account of the classicaltheory of Shub's expanding endomorphisms is given; it does not have a book presentation in English language mathematical literature.

How do you draw a heptagon? What about a heptakaidecagon? How do you fit circles perfectly into triangles? And around them? If the computer is down - could you do it with ruler and compass? In this unique little book, Andrew Sutton guides you through the once treasured principles of ruler and compass constructions, used for centuries by architects, carpenters, stonemasons and master craftsmen. Designed to last until the lights go out, this is a timeless book. WOODEN BOOKS are small but packed with information. "Fascinating" FINANCIAL TIMES. "Beautiful" LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS. "Rich and Artful" THE LANCET. "Genuinely mind-expanding" FORTEAN TIMES. "Excellent" NEW SCIENTIST. "Stunning" NEW YORK TIMES. Small books, big ideas.

"Presents a summary of selected mathematics topics from college/university level mathematics courses. Fundamental principles are reviewed and presented by way of examples, figures, tables and diagrams. It condenses and presents under one cover basic concepts from several different applied mathematics topics"--P. [4] of cover.

Advanced Topics in Linear Algebra presents, in an engaging style, novel topics linked through the Weyr matrix canonical form, a largely unknown cousin of the Jordan canonical form discovered by Eduard Weyr in 1885. The book also develops much linear algebra unconnected to canonical forms, that has not previously appeared in book form. It presents common applications of Weyr form, including matrix commutativity problems, approximate simultaneous diagonalization, and algebraic geometry, with the latter two having topical connections to phylogenetic invariants in biomathematics and multivariate interpolation. The Weyr form clearly outperforms the Jordan form in many situations, particularly where two or more commuting matrices are involved, due to the block upper triangular form a Weyr matrix forces on any commuting matrix. In this book, the authors develop the Weyr form from scratch, and include an algorithm for computing it. The Weyr form is also derived ring-theoretically in an entirely different way to the classical derivation of the Jordan form. A fascinating duality exists between the two forms that allows one to flip back and forth and exploit the combined powers of each. The book weaves together ideas from various mathematical disciplines, demonstrating dramatically the variety and unity of mathematics. Though the book's main focus is linear algebra, it also draws upon ideas from commutative and noncommutative ring theory, module theory, field theory, topology, and algebraic geometry. Advanced Topics in Linear Algebra offers self-contained accounts of the non-trivial results used from outside linear algebra, and lots of worked examples, thereby making it accessible to graduate students. Indeed, the scope of the book makes it an appealing graduate text, either as a reference or for an appropriately designed one or two semester course. A number of the authors' previously unpublished results appear as well.

The objective of this book is to look at certain commutative graded algebras that appear frequently in algebraic geometry. By studying classical constructions from geometry from the point of view of modern commutative algebra, this carefully-written book is a valuable source of information, offering a careful algebraic systematization and treatment of the problems at hand, and contributing to the study of the original geometric questions. In greater detail, the material covers aspects of rational maps (graph, degree, birationality, specialization, combinatorics), Cremona transformations, polar maps, Gauss maps, the geometry of Fitting ideals, tangent varieties, joins and secants, Aluffi algebras. The book includes sections of exercises to help put in practice the theoretic material instead of the mere complementary additions to the theory.

Presenting an overview of most aspects of modern Banach space theory and its applications, this handbook offers up-to-date surveys by a range of expert authors. The surveys discuss the relation of the subject with such areas as harmonic analysis, complex analysis, classical convexity, probability theory, operator theory, combinatorics, logic, geometric measure theory and partial differential equations. It begins with a chapter on basic concepts in Banach space theory, which contains all the background needed for reading any other chapter. Each of the 21 articles after his is devoted to one specific direction of Banach space theory or its applications. Each article contains a motivated introduction as well as an exposition of the main results, methods and open problems in its specific direction. Many articles contain new proofs of known results as well as expositions of proofs which are hard to locate in the literature or are only outlined in the original research papers. The handbook should be useful to researchers in Banach theory, as well as graduate students and mathematicians who want to get an idea of the various developments in Banach space theory.