This standard reference on applications of invariant theory to the construction of moduli spaces is a systematic exposition of the geometric aspects of classical theory of polynomial invariants. This new, revised edition is completely updated and enlarged with an additional chapter on the moment map by Professor Frances Kirwan. It includes a fully updated bibliography of work in this area.

Pattern theory is a distinctive approach to the analysis of all forms of real-world signals. At its core is the design of a large variety of probabilistic models whose samples reproduce the look and feel of the real signals, their patterns, and their variability. Bayesian statistical inference then allows you to apply these models in the analysis of new signals.

This book treats the mathematical tools, the models themselves, and the computational algorithms for applying statistics to analyze six representative classes of signals of increasing complexity. The book covers patterns in text, sound, and images. Discussions of images include recognizing characters, textures, nature scenes, and human faces. The text includes online access to the materials (data, code, etc.) needed for the exercises.

The human face is perhaps the most familiar and easily recognized object in the world, yet both its three-dimensional shape and its two-dimensional images are complex and hard to characterize. This book develops the vocabulary of ridges and parabolic curves, of illumination eigenfaces and elastic warpings for describing the perceptually salient features of a face and its images. The book also explores the underlying mathematics and applies these mathematical techniques to the computer vision problem of face recognition, using both optical and range images.

Felix Klein, a great geometer of the nineteenth century, rediscovered an idea from Hindu mythology in mathematics: the heaven of Indra in which the whole Universe was mirrored in each pearl in a net of pearls. Practically impossible to represent by hand, this idea barely existed outside the imagination, until the 1980s when the authors embarked on the first computer investigation of Klein's vision. In this extraordinary book they explore the path from some basic mathematical ideas to the simple algorithms that create delicate fractal filigrees, most appearing in print for the first time. Step-by-step instructions for writing computer programs allow beginners to generate the images.

The human face is perhaps the most familiar and easily recognized object in the world, yet both its three-dimensional shape and its two-dimensional images are complex and hard to characterize. This book develops the vocabulary of ridges and parabolic curves, of illumination eigenfaces and elastic warpings for describing the perceptually salient features of a face and its images. The book also explores the underlying mathematics and applies these mathematical techniques to the computer vision problem of face recognition, using both optical and range images.

Mumford is a well-known mathematician and winner of the Fields Medal, the highest honor available in mathematics Many of these papers are currently unavailable, and the correspondence with Grothendieck has never before been published

This standard reference on applications of invariant theory to the construction of moduli spaces is a systematic exposition of the geometric aspects of classical theory of polynomial invariants. This new, revised edition is completely updated and enlarged with an additional chapter on the moment map by Professor Frances Kirwan. It includes a fully updated bibliography of work in this area.

The second in a series of three volumes surveying the theory of theta functions, this volume gives emphasis to the special properties of the theta functions associated with compact Riemann surfaces and how they lead to solutions of the Korteweg-de-Vries equations as well as other non-linear differential equations of mathematical physics. This book presents an explicit elementary construction of hyperelliptic Jacobian varieties and is a self-contained introduction to the theory of the Jacobians. It also ties together nineteenth-century discoveries due to Jacobi, Neumann, and Frobenius with recent discoveries of Gelfand, McKean, Moser, John Fay, and others. A definitive body of information and research on the subject of theta functions, this volume will be a useful addition to the individual and mathematics research libraries.

This volume is the first of three in a series surveying the theory of theta functions. Based on lectures given by the author at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, these volumes constitute a systematic exposition of theta functions, beginning with their historical roots as analytic functions in one variable (Volume I), touching on some of the beautiful ways they can be used to describe moduli spaces (Volume II), and culminating in a methodical comparison of theta functions in analysis, algebraic geometry, and representation theory (Volume III).

Mumford's famous Red Book gives a simple readable account of the basic objects of algebraic geometry, preserving as much as possible their geometric flavor and integrating this with the tools of commutative algebra. It is aimed at graduate students or mathematicians in other fields wishing to learn quickly what algebraic geometry is all about. This new edition also includes an overview of the theory of curves, their moduli spaces and their Jacobians, one of the most exciting fields within algebraic geometry. The book is aimed at graduate students and professors seeking to learni) the concept of "scheme" as part of their study of algebraic geometry and ii) an overview of moduli problems for curves and of the use of theta functions to study these.

Mumford is a well-known mathematician and winner of the Fields Medal, the highest honor available in mathematics. Many of these papers are currently unavailable, and the commentaries by Gieseker, Lange, Viehweg and Kempf are being published here for the first time.

The new edition of this celebrated and long-unavailable book preserves much of the content and structure of the original, which is still unrivaled in its presentation of a universal method for the resolution of a class of singularities in algebraic geometry. At the same time, the book has been completely retypeset, errors have been eliminated, proofs have been streamlined, the notation has been made consistent and uniform, an index has been added, and a guide to recent literature has been added. The authors begin by reviewing key results in the theory of toroidal embeddings and by explaining examples that illustrate the theory. Chapter II develops the theory of open self-adjoint homogeneous cones and their polyhedral reduction theory. Chapter III is devoted to basic facts on hermitian symmetric domains and culminates in the construction of toroidal compactifications of their quotients by an arithmetic group. The final chapter considers several applications of the general results. The book brings together ideas from algebraic geometry, differential geometry, representation theory and number theory, and will continue to prove of value for researchers and graduate students in these areas.

Felix Klein, one of the great nineteenth-century geometers, discovered in mathematics an idea prefigured in Buddhist mythology: the heaven of Indra contained a net of pearls, each of which was reflected in its neighbour, so that the whole Universe was mirrored in each pearl. Klein studied infinitely repeated reflections and was led to forms with multiple coexisting symmetries. For a century, these images barely existed outside the imagination of mathematicians. However, in the 1980s, the authors embarked on the first computer exploration of Klein's vision, and in doing so found many further extraordinary images. Join the authors on the path from basic mathematical ideas to the simple algorithms that create the delicate fractal filigrees, most of which have never appeared in print before. Beginners can follow the step-by-step instructions for writing programs that generate the images. Others can see how the images relate to ideas at the forefront of research.

Computer vision seeks a process that starts with a noisy, ambiguous signal from a TV camera and ends with a high-level description of discrete objects located in 3-dimensional space and identified in a human classification. This book addresses the process at several levels. First to be treated are the low-level image-processing issues of noise removaland smoothing while preserving important lines and singularities in an image. At a slightly higher level, a robust contour tracing algorithm is described that produces a cartoon of the important lines in the image. Thirdis the high-level task of reconstructing the geometry of objects in the scene. The book has two aims: to give the computer vision community a new approach to early visual processing, in the form of image segmentation that incorporates occlusion at a low level, and to introduce real computer algorithms that do a better job than what most vision programmers use currently. The algorithms are: - a nonlinear filter that reduces noise and enhances edges, - an edge detector that also finds corners and produces smoothed contours rather than bitmaps, - an algorithm for filling gaps in contours.

These lectures, delivered by Professor Mumford at Harvard in 1963-1964, are devoted to a study of properties of families of algebraic curves, on a non-singular projective algebraic curve defined over an algebraically closed field of arbitrary characteristic. The methods and techniques of Grothendieck, which have so changed the character of algebraic geometry in recent years, are used systematically throughout. Thus the classical material is presented from a new viewpoint.

From the reviews: "Although several textbooks on modern algebraic geometry have been published in the meantime, Mumford's "Volume I" is, together with its predecessor the red book of varieties and schemes, now as before one of the most excellent and profound primers of modern algebraic geometry. Both books are just true classics " Zentralblatt

This annual anthology brings together the year's finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, "The Best Writing on Mathematics 2012" makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else--and you don't need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These writings offer surprising insights into the nature, meaning, and practice of mathematics today. They delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday occurrences of math, and take readers behind the scenes of today's hottest mathematical debates. Here Robert Lang explains mathematical aspects of origami foldings; Terence Tao discusses the frequency and distribution of the prime numbers; Timothy Gowers and Mario Livio ponder whether mathematics is invented or discovered; Brian Hayes describes what is special about a ball in five dimensions; Mark Colyvan glosses on the mathematics of dating; and much, much more.

In addition to presenting the year's most memorable writings on mathematics, this must-have anthology includes a foreword by esteemed mathematician David Mumford and an introduction by the editor Mircea Pitici. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in where math has taken us--and where it is headed.

Several generations of students of algebraic geometry have learned the subject from David Mumford's fabled "Red Book" containing notes of his lectures at Harvard University. Their genesis and evolution are described in the preface as: Initially notes to the course were mimeographed and bound and sold by the Harvard math department with a red cover. These old notes were picked up by Springer and are now sold as the "Red book of Varieties and Schemes". However, every time I taught the course, the content changed and grew. I had aimed to eventually publish more polished notes in three volumes... This book contains what Mumford had then intended to be Volume II. It covers the material in the "Red Book" in more depth with several more topics added. The notes have been brought to the present form in collaboration with T. Oda.