The falling cat is an interesting theme to pursue, in which geometry, mechanics, and control are in action together. As is well known, cats can almost always land on their feet when tossed into the air in an upside-down attitude. If cats are not given a non-vanishing angular momentum at an initial instant, they cannot rotate during their motion, and the motion they can make in the air is vibration only. However, cats accomplish a half turn without rotation when landing on their feet. In order to solve this apparent mystery, one needs to thoroughly understand rotations and vibrations. The connection theory in differential geometry can provide rigorous definitions of rotation and vibration for many-body systems. Deformable bodies of cats are not easy to treat mechanically. A feasible way to approach the question of the falling cat is to start with many-body systems and then proceed to rigid bodies and, further, to jointed rigid bodies, which can approximate the body of a cat. In this book, the connection theory is applied first to a many-body system to show that vibrational motions of the many-body system can result in rotations without performing rotational motions and then to the cat model consisting of jointed rigid bodies. On the basis of this geometric setting, mechanics of many-body systems and of jointed rigid bodies must be set up. In order to take into account the fact that cats can deform their bodies, three torque inputs which may give a twist to the cat model are applied as control inputs under the condition of the vanishing angular momentum. Then, a control is designed according to the port-controlled Hamiltonian method for the model cat to perform a half turn and to halt the motion upon landing. The book also gives a brief review of control systems through simple examples to explain the role of control inputs.

This book provides an understandable review of SU(3) representations, SU(3) Wigner-Racah algebra and the SU(3) SO(3) integrity basis operators, which are often considered to be difficult and are avoided by most nuclear physicists. Explaining group algebras that apply to specific physical systems and discussing their physical applications, the book is a useful resource for researchers in nuclear physics. At the same time it helps experimentalists to interpret data on rotational nuclei by using SU(3) symmetry that appears in a variety of nuclear models, such as the shell model, pseudo-SU(3) model, proxy-SU(3) model, symplectic Sp(6, R) model, various interacting boson models, various interacting boson-fermion models, and cluster models. In addition to presenting the results from all these models, the book also describes a variety of statistical results that follow from the SU(3) symmetry.

This proceedings volume gathers selected, peer-reviewed works presented at the Polynomial Rings and Affine Algebraic Geometry Conference, which was held at Tokyo Metropolitan University on February 12-16, 2018. Readers will find some of the latest research conducted by an international group of experts on affine and projective algebraic geometry. The topics covered include group actions and linearization, automorphism groups and their structure as infinite-dimensional varieties, invariant theory, the Cancellation Problem, the Embedding Problem, Mathieu spaces and the Jacobian Conjecture, the Dolgachev-Weisfeiler Conjecture, classification of curves and surfaces, real forms of complex varieties, and questions of rationality, unirationality, and birationality. These papers will be of interest to all researchers and graduate students working in the fields of affine and projective algebraic geometry, as well as on certain aspects of commutative algebra, Lie theory, symplectic geometry and Stein manifolds.

This book focuses on the Symmetric Informationally Complete quantum measurements (SICs) in dimensions 2 and 3, along with one set of SICs in dimension 8. These objects stand out in ways that have earned them the moniker of "sporadic SICs". By some standards, they are more approachable than the other known SICs, while by others they are simply atypical. The author forays into quantum information theory using them as examples, and the author explores their connections with other exceptional objects like the Leech lattice and integral octonions. The sporadic SICs take readers from the classification of finite simple groups to Bell's theorem and the discovery that "hidden variables" cannot explain away quantum uncertainty. While no one department teaches every subject to which the sporadic SICs pertain, the topic is approachable without too much background knowledge. The book includes exercises suitable for an elective at the graduate or advanced undergraduate level.

This book gathers together selected contributions presented at the 3rd Moroccan Andalusian Meeting on Algebras and their Applications, held in Chefchaouen, Morocco, April 12-14, 2018, and which reflects the mathematical collaboration between south European and north African countries, mainly France, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal. The book is divided in three parts and features contributions from the following fields: algebraic and analytic methods in associative and non-associative structures; homological and categorical methods in algebra; and history of mathematics. Covering topics such as rings and algebras, representation theory, number theory, operator algebras, category theory, group theory and information theory, it opens up new avenues of study for graduate students and young researchers. The findings presented also appeal to anyone interested in the fields of algebra and mathematical analysis.

This book provides an introduction to the ergodic theory and topological dynamics of actions of countable groups. It is organized around the theme of probabilistic and combinatorial independence, and highlights the complementary roles of the asymptotic and the perturbative in its comprehensive treatment of the core concepts of weak mixing, compactness, entropy, and amenability. The more advanced material includes Popa's cocycle superrigidity, the Furstenberg-Zimmer structure theorem, and sofic entropy. The structure of the book is designed to be flexible enough to serve a variety of readers. The discussion of dynamics is developed from scratch assuming some rudimentary functional analysis, measure theory, and topology, and parts of the text can be used as an introductory course. Researchers in ergodic theory and related areas will also find the book valuable as a reference.

The last few decades have been among the most dynamic within recent British cultural history. Artists across all genres and media have developed and re-fashioned their practice against a radically changing social and cultural landscape - both national and global. This book takes a fresh look at some of the themes, ideas and directions which have informed British art since the later 1980s through to the first decade of the new millennium. In addition to discussing some iconic images and examples, it also looks more broadly at the contexts in which a new 'post-conceptual' generation of artists, those typically born since the late 1950s and 1960s have approached and developed aspects of their professional practice. Contemporary British Art is an ideal introduction to the field. To guide the reader, the book is organised around genres or related practices - painting; sculpture and installation; and film, video and performance. The first chapter explores aspects of the contemporary art market and some of the contexts within which art is made, supported and exhibited. The chapters that discuss various genres of art practice also mention books that may be useful to support further reading. Extensively illustrated with a wide range of work (both known, and less well-known) from artists such as Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Anthony Gormley, Jack Vettriano, Sam Taylor-Wood, Steve McQueen and Tracey Emin, and many more.

The book consists of articles based on the XXXVII Bialowieza Workshop on Geometric Methods in Physics, 2018. The series of Bialowieza workshops, attended by a community of experts at the crossroads of mathematics and physics, is a major annual event in the field. This edition of the workshop featured a special session dedicated to Professor Daniel Sternheimer on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The previously unpublished papers present cutting-edge current research, typically grounded in geometry and analysis, with applications to classical and quantum physics. For the past seven years, the Bialowieza Workshops have been complemented by a School on Geometry and Physics comprising a series of advanced lectures for graduate students and early-career researchers. The book also includes abstracts of the five lecture series that were given at the seventh school.

This book collects and coherently presents the research that has been undertaken since the author's previous book Module Theory (1998). In addition to some of the key results since 1995, it also discusses the development of much of the supporting material. In the twenty years following the publication of the Camps-Dicks theorem, the work of Facchini, Herbera, Shamsuddin, Puninski, Prihoda and others has established the study of serial modules and modules with semilocal endomorphism rings as one of the promising directions for module-theoretic research. Providing readers with insights into the directions in which the research in this field is moving, as well as a better understanding of how it interacts with other research areas, the book appeals to undergraduates and graduate students as well as researchers interested in algebra.

This book is the second edition, whose original mission was to offer a new approach for students wishing to better understand the mathematical tenets that underlie the study of physics. This mission is retained in this book. The structure of the book is one that keeps pedagogical principles in mind at every level. Not only are the chapters sequenced in such a way as to guide the reader down a clear path that stretches throughout the book, but all individual sections and subsections are also laid out so that the material they address becomes progressively more complex along with the reader's ability to comprehend it. This book not only improves upon the first in many details, but it also fills in some gaps that were left open by this and other books on similar topics. The 350 problems presented here are accompanied by answers which now include a greater amount of detail and additional guidance for arriving at the solutions. In this way, the mathematical underpinnings of the relevant physics topics are made as easy to absorb as possible.

Capturing Adriano Garsia's unique perspective on essential topics in algebraic combinatorics, this book consists of selected, classic notes on a number of topics based on lectures held at the University of California, San Diego over the past few decades. The topics presented share a common theme of describing interesting interplays between algebraic topics such as representation theory and elegant structures which are sometimes thought of as being outside the purview of classical combinatorics. The lectures reflect Garsia's inimitable narrative style and his exceptional expository ability. The preface presents the historical viewpoint as well as Garsia's personal insights into the subject matter. The lectures then start with a clear treatment of Alfred Young's construction of the irreducible representations of the symmetric group, seminormal representations and Morphy elements. This is followed by an elegant application of SL(2) representations to algebraic combinatorics. The last two lectures are on heaps, continued fractions and orthogonal polynomials with applications, and finally there is an exposition on the theory of finite fields. The book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in the field.

This is the first book on elliptic quantum groups, i.e., quantum groups associated to elliptic solutions of the Yang-Baxter equation. Based on research by the author and his collaborators, the book presents a comprehensive survey on the subject including a brief history of formulations and applications, a detailed formulation of the elliptic quantum group in the Drinfeld realization, explicit construction of both finite and infinite-dimensional representations, and a construction of the vertex operators as intertwining operators of these representations. The vertex operators are important objects in representation theory of quantum groups. In this book, they are used to derive the elliptic q-KZ equations and their elliptic hypergeometric integral solutions. In particular, the so-called elliptic weight functions appear in such solutions. The author's recent study showed that these elliptic weight functions are identified with Okounkov's elliptic stable envelopes for certain equivariant elliptic cohomology and play an important role to construct geometric representations of elliptic quantum groups. Okounkov's geometric approach to quantum integrable systems is a rapidly growing topic in mathematical physics related to the Bethe ansatz, the Alday-Gaiotto-Tachikawa correspondence between 4D SUSY gauge theories and the CFT's, and the Nekrasov-Shatashvili correspondences between quantum integrable systems and quantum cohomology. To invite the reader to such topics is one of the aims of this book.

This book is the result of a meeting on Topology and Functional Analysis, and is dedicated to Professor Manuel Lopez-Pellicer's mathematical research. Covering topics in descriptive topology and functional analysis, including topological groups and Banach space theory, fuzzy topology, differentiability and renorming, tensor products of Banach spaces and aspects of Cp-theory, this volume is particularly useful to young researchers wanting to learn about the latest developments in these areas.

This book provides a comprehensive study of turnpike phenomenon arising in optimal control theory. The focus is on individual (non-generic) turnpike results which are both mathematically significant and have numerous applications in engineering and economic theory. All results obtained in the book are new. New approaches, techniques, and methods are rigorously presented and utilize research from finite-dimensional variational problems and discrete-time optimal control problems to find the necessary conditions for the turnpike phenomenon in infinite dimensional spaces. The semigroup approach is employed in the discussion as well as PDE descriptions of continuous-time dynamics. The main results on sufficient and necessary conditions for the turnpike property are completely proved and the numerous illustrative examples support the material for the broad spectrum of experts. Mathematicians interested in the calculus of variations, optimal control and in applied functional analysis will find this book a useful guide to the turnpike phenomenon in infinite dimensional spaces. Experts in economic and engineering modeling as well as graduate students will also benefit from the developed techniques and obtained results.

This monograph is the first comprehensive treatment of multiplicity-free induced representations of finite groups as a generalization of finite Gelfand pairs. Up to now, researchers have been somehow reluctant to face such a problem in a general situation, and only partial results were obtained in the one-dimensional case. Here, for the first time, new interesting and important results are proved. In particular, after developing a general theory (including the study of the associated Hecke algebras and the harmonic analysis of the corresponding spherical functions), two completely new highly nontrivial and significant examples (in the setting of linear groups over finite fields) are examined in full detail. The readership ranges from graduate students to experienced researchers in Representation Theory and Harmonic Analysis.

This book provides an up-to-date presentation of homogeneous pseudo-Riemannian structures, an essential tool in the study of pseudo-Riemannian homogeneous spaces. Benefiting from large symmetry groups, these spaces are of high interest in Geometry and Theoretical Physics. Since the seminal book by Tricerri and Vanhecke, the theory of homogeneous structures has been considerably developed and many applications have been found. The present work covers a gap in the literature of more than 35 years, presenting the latest contributions to the field in a modern geometric approach, with special focus on manifolds equipped with pseudo-Riemannian metrics. This unique reference on the topic will be of interest to researchers working in areas of mathematics where homogeneous spaces play an important role, such as Differential Geometry, Global Analysis, General Relativity, and Particle Physics.

This book describes the relation between profinite semigroups and symbolic dynamics. Profinite semigroups are topological semigroups which are compact and residually finite. In particular, free profinite semigroups can be seen as the completion of free semigroups with respect to the profinite metric. In this metric, two words are close if one needs a morphism on a large finite monoid to distinguish them. The main focus is on a natural correspondence between minimal shift spaces (closed shift-invariant sets of two-sided infinite words) and maximal J-classes (certain subsets of free profinite semigroups). This correspondence sheds light on many aspects of both profinite semigroups and symbolic dynamics. For example, the return words to a given word in a shift space can be related to the generators of the group of the corresponding J-class. The book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in mathematics or theoretical computer science.

This book provides a thorough introduction to the theory of complex semisimple quantum groups, that is, Drinfeld doubles of q-deformations of compact semisimple Lie groups. The presentation is comprehensive, beginning with background information on Hopf algebras, and ending with the classification of admissible representations of the q-deformation of a complex semisimple Lie group. The main components are: - a thorough introduction to quantized universal enveloping algebras over general base fields and generic deformation parameters, including finite dimensional representation theory, the Poincare-Birkhoff-Witt Theorem, the locally finite part, and the Harish-Chandra homomorphism, - the analytic theory of quantized complex semisimple Lie groups in terms of quantized algebras of functions and their duals, - algebraic representation theory in terms of category O, and - analytic representation theory of quantized complex semisimple groups. Given its scope, the book will be a valuable resource for both graduate students and researchers in the area of quantum groups.

This book collects the notes of the lectures given at the Advanced Course on Crossed Products, Groupoids, and Rokhlin dimension, that took place at the Centre de Recerca Matematica (CRM) from March 13 to March 17, 2017. The notes consist of three series of lectures. The first one was given by Dana Williams (Dartmouth College), and served as an introduction to crossed products of C*-algebras and the study of their structure. The second series of lectures was delivered by Aidan Sims (Wollongong), who gave an overview of the theory of topological groupoids (as a model for groups and group actions) and groupoid C*-algebras, with particular emphasis on the case of etale groupoids. Finally, the last series was delivered by Gabor Szabo (Copenhagen), and consisted of an introduction to Rokhlin type properties (mostly centered around the work of Hirshberg, Winter and Zacharias) with hints to the more advanced theory related to groupoids.

This volume resulted from presentations given at the international "Brainstorming Workshop on New Developments in Discrete Mechanics, Geometric Integration and Lie-Butcher Series", that took place at the Instituto de Ciencias Matematicas (ICMAT) in Madrid, Spain. It combines overview and research articles on recent and ongoing developments, as well as new research directions. Why geometric numerical integration? In their article of the same title Arieh Iserles and Reinout Quispel, two renowned experts in numerical analysis of differential equations, provide a compelling answer to this question. After this introductory chapter a collection of high-quality research articles aim at exploring recent and ongoing developments, as well as new research directions in the areas of geometric integration methods for differential equations, nonlinear systems interconnections, and discrete mechanics. One of the highlights is the unfolding of modern algebraic and combinatorial structures common to those topics, which give rise to fruitful interactions between theoretical as well as applied and computational perspectives. The volume is aimed at researchers and graduate students interested in theoretical and computational problems in geometric integration theory, nonlinear control theory, and discrete mechanics.

This book sets out an account of the tools which Frobenius used to discover representation theory for nonabelian groups and describes its modern applications. It provides a new viewpoint from which one can examine various aspects of representation theory and areas of application, such as probability theory and harmonic analysis. For example, the focal objects of this book, group matrices, can be thought of as a generalization of the circulant matrices which are behind many important algorithms in information science. The book is designed to appeal to several audiences, primarily mathematicians working either in group representation theory or in areas of mathematics where representation theory is involved. Parts of it may be used to introduce undergraduates to representation theory by studying the appealing pattern structure of group matrices. It is also intended to attract readers who are curious about ideas close to the heart of group representation theory, which do not usually appear in modern accounts, but which offer new perspectives.

This book introduces the reader to the most important concepts and problems in the field of (2)-invariants. After some foundational material on group von Neumann algebras, (2)-Betti numbers are defined and their use is illustrated by several examples. The text continues with Atiyah's question on possible values of (2)-Betti numbers and the relation to Kaplansky's zero divisor conjecture. The general definition of (2)-Betti numbers allows for applications in group theory. A whole chapter is dedicated to Luck's approximation theorem and its generalizations. The final chapter deals with (2)-torsion, twisted variants and the conjectures relating them to torsion growth in homology. The text provides a self-contained treatment that constructs the required specialized concepts from scratch. It comes with numerous exercises and examples, so that both graduate students and researchers will find it useful for self-study or as a basis for an advanced lecture course.

This book provides an accessible introduction to the state of the art of representation theory of finite groups. Starting from a basic level that is summarized at the start, the book proceeds to cover topics of current research interest, including open problems and conjectures. The central themes of the book are block theory and module theory of group representations, which are comprehensively surveyed with a full bibliography. The individual chapters cover a range of topics within the subject, from blocks with cyclic defect groups to representations of symmetric groups. Assuming only modest background knowledge at the level of a first graduate course in algebra, this guidebook, intended for students taking first steps in the field, will also provide a reference for more experienced researchers. Although no proofs are included, end-of-chapter exercises make it suitable for student seminars.

This highly readable book aims to ease the many challenges of starting undergraduate research. It accomplishes this by presenting a diverse series of self-contained, accessible articles which include specific open problems and prepare the reader to tackle them with ample background material and references. Each article also contains a carefully selected bibliography for further reading. The content spans the breadth of mathematics, including many topics that are not normally addressed by the undergraduate curriculum (such as matroid theory, mathematical biology, and operations research), yet have few enough prerequisites that the interested student can start exploring them under the guidance of a faculty member. Whether trying to start an undergraduate thesis, embarking on a summer REU, or preparing for graduate school, this book is appropriate for a variety of students and the faculty who guide them.

This book contains selected papers based on talks given at the "Representation Theory, Number Theory, and Invariant Theory" conference held at Yale University from June 1 to June 5, 2015. The meeting and this resulting volume are in honor of Professor Roger Howe, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, whose work and insights have been deeply influential in the development of these fields. The speakers who contributed to this work include Roger Howe's doctoral students, Roger Howe himself, and other world renowned mathematicians. Topics covered include automorphic forms, invariant theory, representation theory of reductive groups over local fields, and related subjects.