'Et moi .... si j'avait su comment en revenir. One service mathematics has rendered the human race. It has put common sense back je n'y serais point aUe.' it belongs. on the topmost shelf next Jules Verne where to the dusty canister labelled 'discarded non. The series is divergent: therefore we may be sense'. Eric T. Bell able to do something with it. o. Heaviside Mathematics is a tool for thought. A highly necessary tool in a world where both feedback and non linearities abound. Similarly, all kinds of parts of mathematics serve as tools for other parts and for other sciences. Applying a simple rewriting rule to the quote on the right above one finds such statements as: 'One service topology has rendered mathematical physics .. .'; 'One service logic has rendered com puter science .. .'; 'One service category theory has rendered mathematics .. .'. All arguably true. And all statements obtainable this way form part of the raison d'etre of this series."

A reference textbook that summarizes the "algebra of analysis" that includes some mention of the contemporary trends in the development of history. This text provides an up-to-date account of Banach and locally convex algebras with emphasis on general theory, representations and homology. In its description of general theory and in the examples it considers it is faithful to earlier traditions in the subject but differs from those books in being based on an approach through homological algebra. This approach leads Helemskii to consider topics not covered at this level in any other book. These topics include: complemented and uncomplemented ideal; projective and weak tensor products of banach algebras; Taylors multivariable holomorphic functional calculus; the Wedderburn decomposition of Banach algevras; a whole chapter on the homology of Banach algebras.