Over the past few years a certain shift of focus within the theory of algebras of generalized functions (in the sense of J. F. Colombeau) has taken place. Originating in infinite dimensional analysis and initially applied mainly to problems in nonlinear partial differential equations involving singularities, the theory has undergone a change both in in ternal structure and scope of applicability, due to a growing number of applications to questions of a more geometric nature. The present book is intended to provide an in-depth presentation of these develop ments comprising its structural aspects within the theory of generalized functions as well as a (selective but, as we hope, representative) set of applications. This main purpose of the book is accompanied by a number of sub ordinate goals which we were aiming at when arranging the material included here. First, despite the fact that by now several excellent mono graphs on Colombeau algebras are available, we have decided to give a self-contained introduction to the field in Chapter 1. Our motivation for this decision derives from two main features of our approach. On the one hand, in contrast to other treatments of the subject we base our intro duction to the field on the so-called special variant of the algebras, which makes many of the fundamental ideas of the field particularly transpar ent and at the same time facilitates and motivates the introduction of the more involved concepts treated later in the chapter."

These two volumes constitute the Proceedings of the Conference Moshe Flato, 1999'. Their spectrum is wide but the various areas covered are, in fact, strongly interwoven by a common denominator, the unique personality and creativity of the scientist in whose honor the Conference was held, and the far-reaching vision that underlies his scientific activity. With these two volumes, the reader will be able to take stock of the present state of the art in a number of subjects at the frontier of current research in mathematics, mathematical physics, and physics. Volume I is prefaced by reminiscences of and tributes to Flato's life and work. It also includes a section on the applications of sciences to insurance and finance, an area which was of interest to Flato before it became fashionable. The bulk of both volumes is on physical mathematics, where the reader will find these ingredients in various combinations, fundamental mathematical developments based on them, and challenging interpretations of physical phenomena. Audience: These volumes will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in a variety of domains, ranging from abstract mathematics to theoretical physics and other applications. Some parts will be accessible to proficient undergraduate students, and even to persons with a minimum of scientific knowledge but enough curiosity."

As K. Nomizu has justly noted [K. Nomizu, 56], Differential Geometry ever will be initiating newer and newer aspects of the theory of Lie groups. This monograph is devoted to just some such aspects of Lie groups and Lie algebras. New differential geometric problems came into being in connection with so called subsymmetric spaces, subsymmetries, and mirrors introduced in our works dating back to 1957 [L.V. Sabinin, 58a,59a,59b]. In addition, the exploration of mirrors and systems of mirrors is of interest in the case of symmetric spaces. Geometrically, the most rich in content there appeared to be the homogeneous Riemannian spaces with systems of mirrors generated by commuting subsymmetries, in particular, so called tri-symmetric spaces introduced in [L.V. Sabinin, 61b]. As to the concrete geometric problem which needs be solved and which is solved in this monograph, we indicate, for example, the problem of the classification of all tri-symmetric spaces with simple compact groups of motions. Passing from groups and subgroups connected with mirrors and subsymmetries to the corresponding Lie algebras and subalgebras leads to an important new concept of the involutive sum of Lie algebras [L.V. Sabinin, 65]. This concept is directly concerned with unitary symmetry of elementary par- cles (see [L.V. Sabinin, 95,85] and Appendix 1). The first examples of involutive (even iso-involutive) sums appeared in the - ploration of homogeneous Riemannian spaces with and axial symmetry. The consideration of spaces with mirrors [L.V. Sabinin, 59b] again led to iso-involutive sums.

This book is a monograph on unitals embedded in ?nite projective planes. Unitals are an interesting structure found in square order projective planes, and numerous research articles constructing and discussing these structures have appeared in print. More importantly, there still are many open pr- lems, and this remains a fruitful area for Ph.D. dissertations. Unitals play an important role in ?nite geometry as well as in related areas of mathematics. For example, unitals play a parallel role to Baer s- planes when considering extreme values for the size of a blocking set in a square order projective plane (see Section 2.3). Moreover, unitals meet the upper bound for the number of absolute points of any polarity in a square order projective plane (see Section 1.5). From an applications point of view, the linear codes arising from unitals have excellent technical properties (see 2 Section 6.4). The automorphism group of the classical unitalH =H(2, q ) is 2-transitive on the points ofH, and so unitals are of interest in group theory. In the ?eld of algebraic geometry over ?nite ?elds, H is a maximal curve that contains the largest number of F -rational points with respect to its genus, 2 q as established by the Hasse-Weil boun

This book gives the complete classification of Moufang polygons, starting from first principles. In particular, it may serve as an introduction to the various important algebraic concepts which arise in this classification including alternative division rings, quadratic Jordan division algebras of degree three, pseudo-quadratic forms, BN-pairs and norm splittings of quadratic forms. This book also contains a new proof of the classification of irreducible spherical buildings of rank at least three based on the observation that all the irreducible rank two residues of such a building are Moufang polygons. In an appendix, the connection between spherical buildings and algebraic groups is recalled.

In 1991-1993 our three-volume book "Representation of Lie Groups and Spe cial Functions" was published. When we started to write that book (in 1983), editors of "Kluwer Academic Publishers" expressed their wish for the book to be of encyclopaedic type on the subject. Interrelations between representations of Lie groups and special functions are very wide. This width can be explained by existence of different types of Lie groups and by richness of the theory of their rep resentations. This is why the book, mentioned above, spread to three big volumes. Influence of representations of Lie groups and Lie algebras upon the theory of special functions is lasting. This theory is developing further and methods of the representation theory are of great importance in this development. When the book "Representation of Lie Groups and Special Functions," vol. 1-3, was under preparation, new directions of the theory of special functions, connected with group representations, appeared. New important results were discovered in the traditional directions. This impelled us to write a continuation of our three-volume book on relationship between representations and special functions. The result of our further work is the present book. The three-volume book, published before, was devoted mainly to studying classical special functions and orthogonal polynomials by means of matrix elements, Clebsch-Gordan and Racah coefficients of group representations and to generaliza tions of classical special functions that were dictated by matrix elements of repre sentations."

This book presents an up-to-date account of research in important topics of fuzzy group theory. It concentrates on the theoretical aspects of fuzzy subgroups of a group. It includes applications to abstract recognition problems and to coding theory. The book begins with basic properties of fuzzy subgroups. Fuzzy subgroups of Hamiltonian, solvable, P-Hall, and nilpotent groups are discussed. Construction of free fuzzy subgroups is determined. Numerical invariants of fuzzy subgroups of Abelian groups are developed. The problem in group theory of obtaining conditions under which a group can be expressed as a direct product of its normal subgroups is considered. Methods for deriving fuzzy theorems from crisp ones are presented and the embedding of lattices of fuzzy subgroups into lattices of crisp groups is discussed as well as deriving membership functions from similarity relations. The material presented makes this book a good reference for graduate students and researchers working in fuzzy group theory.

This book is a concept-oriented treatment of the structure theory of association schemes. The generalization of Sylow 's group theoretic theorems to scheme theory arises as a consequence of arithmetical considerations about quotient schemes. The theory of Coxeter schemes (equivalent to the theory of buildings) emerges naturally and yields a purely algebraic proof of Tits main theorem on buildings of spherical type.

Do formulas exist for the solution to algebraical equations in one variable of any degree like the formulas for quadratic equations? The main aim of this book is to give new geometrical proof of Abel's theorem, as proposed by Professor V.I. Arnold. The theorem states that for general algebraical equations of a degree higher than 4, there are no formulas representing roots of these equations in terms of coefficients with only arithmetic operations and radicals.

A secondary, and more important aim of this book, is to acquaint the reader with two very important branches of modern mathematics: group theory and theory of functions of a complex variable.

This book also has the added bonus of an extensive appendix devoted to the differential Galois theory, written by Professor A.G. Khovanskii.

As this text has been written assuming no specialist prior knowledge and is composed of definitions, examples, problems and solutions, it is suitable for self-study or teaching students of mathematics, from high school to graduate.

Lotfi Zadeh introduced the notion of a fuzzy subset of a set in 1965. Ris seminal paper has opened up new insights and applications in a wide range of scientific fields. Azriel Rosenfeld used the notion of a fuzzy subset to put forth cornerstone papers in several areas of mathematics, among other discplines. Rosenfeld is the father of fuzzy abstract algebra. Kuroki is re sponsible for much of fuzzy ideal theory of semigroups. Others who worked on fuzzy semigroup theory, such as Xie, are mentioned in the bibliogra phy. The purpose of this book is to present an up to date account of fuzzy subsemigroups and fuzzy ideals of a semigroup. We concentrate mainly on theoretical aspects, but we do include applications. The applications are in the areas of fuzzy coding theory, fuzzy finite state machines, and fuzzy languages. An extensive account of fuzzy automata and fuzzy languages is given in [100]. Consequently, we only consider results in these areas that have not appeared in [100] and that pertain to semigroups. In Chapter 1, we review some basic results on fuzzy subsets, semigroups, codes, finite state machines, and languages. The purpose of this chapter is to present basic results that are needed in the remainder of the book. In Chapter 2, we introduce certain fuzzy ideals of a semigroup, namely, fuzzy two-sided ideals, fuzzy bi-ideals, fuzzy interior ideals, fuzzy quasi ideals, and fuzzy generalized bi-ideals.

This book, the first volume of a subseries on "Invariant Theory and Algebraic Transformation Groups," provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the algorithmic aspects of invariant theory. Numerous illustrative examples and a careful selection of proofs make the book accessible to non-specialists.

In this well-written presentation, motivated by numerous examples and problems, the authors introduce the basic theory of braid groups, highlighting several definitions that show their equivalence; this is followed by a treatment of the relationship between braids, knots and links. Important results then treat the linearity and orderability of the subject. Relevant additional material is included in five large appendices.

Braid Groups will serve graduate students and a number of mathematicians coming from diverse disciplines.

This collection of survey lectures in mathematics traces the career of Beno Eckmann, whose work ranges across a broad spectrum of mathematical concepts from topology through homological algebra to group theory. One of our most influential living mathematicians, Eckmann has been associated for nearly his entire professional life with the Swiss Federal Technical University (ETH) at Zurich, as student, lecturer, professor, and professor emeritus.

Here is a comprehensive treatment of the main results and methods of the theory of Noetherian semigroup algebras. These results are applied and illustrated in the context of important classes of algebras that arise in a variety of areas and have recently been intensively studied. The focus is on the interplay between combinatorics and algebraic structure. Mathematical physicists will find this work interesting for its attention to applications of the Yang-Baxter equation.

How many groups of order n are there? This is a natural question for anyone studying group theory, and this Tract provides an exhaustive and up-to-date account of research into this question spanning almost fifty years. The authors presuppose an undergraduate knowledge of group theory, up to and including Sylow's Theorems, a little knowledge of how a group may be presented by generators and relations, a very little representation theory from the perspective of module theory, and a very little cohomology theory - but most of the basics are expounded here and the book is more or less self-contained. Although it is principally devoted to a connected exposition of an agreeable theory, the book does also contain some material that has not hitherto been published. It is designed to be used as a graduate text but also as a handbook for established research workers in group theory.

This book is the first to systematically explore the classification and function theory of complex homogeneous bounded domains. The Siegel domains are discussed in detail, and proofs are presented. Using the normal Siegel domains to realize the homogeneous bounded domains, we can obtain more property of the geometry and the function theory on homogeneous bounded domains.

When we use science to describe and understand the world around us, we are in essence grasping nature through symmetry. Emphasizing the concepts, this book leads the reader coherently and comprehensively into the fertile field of symmetry and its applications. Among the most important applications considered are the fundamental forces of nature and the Universe. Written by a renowned expert, this book will convince all interested readers of the importance of symmetry in science.

Devoted to the theory of Lie algebras and algebraic groups, this book includes a large amount of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry so as to make it as self-contained as possible. The aim of the book is to assemble in a single volume the algebraic aspects of the theory, so as to present the foundations of the theory in characteristic zero. Detailed proofs are included, and some recent results are discussed in the final chapters.

This book deals mainly with modelling systems that change with time. The evolution equations that it describes can be found in a number of application areas, such as kinetics, fragmentation theory and mathematical biology. This will be the first self-contained account of the area.

How does a machine learn a new concept on the basis of examples? This second edition takes account of important new developments in the field. It also deals extensively with the theory of learning control systems, now comparably mature to learning of neural networks.

This book examines translanguaging as a resource which can disrupt the privileging of particular voices, and a social practice which enables collaboration within and across groups of people. Addressing the themes of collaboration and transformation, the chapters critically examine how people work together to catalyse change in diverse global contexts, experiences and traditions. The authors suggest an epistemological and methodological turn to the study of translanguaging, which is particularly reflected in the collaborative, arts-based and action research/activist approaches followed in the chapters. The book will be of particular interest to scholars using ethnographic, critical and collaborative action and activist research approaches to the study of multilingualism in educational and creative arts contexts.

17):~t? L It CIFDr- ! wei! unsre Weisheit Einfalt ist, From "Lohengrin", Richard Wagner At the time of the appearance of the first volume of this work in 1967, the tempestuous development of finite group theory had already made it virtually impossible to give a complete presentation of the subject in one treatise. The present volume and its successor have therefore the more modest aim of giving descriptions of the recent development of certain important parts of the subject, and even in these parts no attempt at completeness has been made. Chapter VII deals with the representation theory of finite groups in arbitrary fields with particular attention to those of non-zero charac teristic. That part of modular representation theory which is essentially the block theory of complex characters has not been included, as there are already monographs on this subject and others will shortly appear. Instead, we have restricted ourselves to such results as can be obtained by purely module-theoretical means.

This is the second volume of the new subseries "Invariant Theory and Algebraic Transformation Groups." The aim of the survey by A. Bialynicki-Birula is to present the main trends and achievements of research in the theory of quotients by actions of algebraic groups. This theory contains geometric invariant theory with various applications to problems of moduli theory. The contribution by J. Carrell treats the subject of torus actions on algebraic varieties, giving a detailed exposition of many of the cohomological results one obtains from having a torus action with fixed points. Many examples, such as toric varieties and flag varieties, are discussed in detail. W.M. McGovern studies the actions of a semisimple Lie or algebraic group on its Lie algebra via the adjoint action and on itself via conjugation. His contribution focuses primarily on nilpotent orbits that have found the widest application to representation theory in the last thirty-five years.

"Essays in Group Theory" contains five papers on topics of current interest which were presented in a seminar at MSRI, Berkeley in June, 1985. Special mention should be given to Gromovs paper, one of the most significant in the field in the last decade. It develops the theory of hyperbolic groups to include a version of small cancellation theory sufficiently powerful to recover deep results of Ol'shanskii and Rips. Each of the remaining papers, by Baumslag and Shalen, Gersten, Shalen, and Stallings contains gems. For example, the reader will delight in Stallings' explicit construction of free actions of orientable surface groups on R-trees. Gersten's paper lays the foundations for a theory of equations over groups and contains a very quick solution to conjugacy problem for a class of hyperbolic groups. Shalen's article reviews the rapidly expanding theory of group actions on R-trees and the Baumslag-Shalen article uses modular representation theory to establish properties of presentations whose relators are pth-powers.

Although group theory has played a significant role in the development of various disciplines of physics, there are few recent books that start from the beginning and then build on to consider applications of group theory from the point of view of high energy physicists. Group Theory for High Energy Physicists fills that role. It presents groups, especially Lie groups, and their characteristics in a way that is easily comprehensible to physicists. The book first introduces the concept of a group and the characteristics that are imperative for developing group theory as applied to high energy physics. It then describes group representations since matrix representations of a group are often more convenient to deal with than the abstract group itself. With a focus on continuous groups, the text analyzes the root structure of important groups and obtains the weights of various representations of these groups. It also explains how symmetry principles associated with group theoretical techniques can be used to interpret experimental results and make predictions. This concise, gentle introduction is accessible to undergraduate and graduate students in physics and mathematics as well as researchers in high energy physics. It shows how to apply group theory to solve high energy physics problems.