This study attempts to present a broad picture of political and economic developments in Russia after the collapse of the USSR. The book focuses on economics, social, financial and political tendencies that framed Russia's development in 1992-98, including an overview of successes and failures of Russian reform attempts, background and consequences of the collapse of Russia's financial market in August 1998, dynamics of capital flight from Russia, industrial, agricultural, trade and social development indicators. A major part of the study is devoted to a comparative analysis of developments in Russia's eighty nine administrative regions, particularly in the three major groups of regions - with predominantly mining, manufacturing and agricultural orientation. The book also examines voting patterns and political preferences in Russian regions, origins and the evolution of the Russian political system, limitations of the post-Soviet 'nomenklatura revolution' and Russia's search for a new national idea.

This book contains several contributions on the most outstanding events in the development of twentieth century mathematics, representing a wide variety of specialities in which Russian and Soviet mathematicians played a considerable role. The articles are written in an informal style, from mathematical philosophy to the description of the development of ideas, personal memories and give a unique account of personal meetings with famous representatives of twentieth century mathematics who exerted great influence in its development.

This book will be of great interest to mathematicians, who will enjoy seeing their own specialities described with some historical perspective. Historians will read it with the same motive, and perhaps also to select topics for future investigation.

The creative work of Andrei N. Kolmogorov is exceptionally wide-ranging. In his studies on trigonometric and orthogonal series, the theory of measure and inte gral, mathematical logic, approximation theory, geometry, topology, functional analysis, classical mechanics, ergodic theory, superposition of functions, and in formation theory, he solved many conceptual and fundamental problems and posed new questions which gave rise to a great deal of further research. Kolmogorov is one of the founders of the Soviet school of probability theory, mathematical statistics, and the theory of turbulence. In these areas he obtained a number of central results, with many applications to mechanics, geophysics, linguistics and biology, among other subjects. This edition includes Kolmogorov's most important papers on mathematics and the natural sciences. It does not include his philosophical and ped agogical studies, his articles written for the "Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya", his papers on prosody and applications of mathematics or his publications on general questions. The material of this edition was selected and compiled by Kolmogorov himself. The first volume consists of papers on mathematics and also on turbulence and classical mechanics. The second volume is devoted to probability theory and mathematical statistics. The focus of the third volume is on information theory and the theory of algorithms.

Intended for a wide range of readers, this book covers the main ideas of convex analysis and approximation theory. The author discusses the sources of these two trends in mathematical analysis, develops the main concepts and results, and mentions some beautiful theorems. The relationship of convex analysis to optimization problems, to the calculus of variations, to optimal control and to geometry is considered, and the evolution of the ideas underlying approximation theory, from its origins to the present day, is discussed. The book is addressed both to students who want to acquaint themselves with these trends and to lecturers in mathematical analysis, optimization and numerical methods, as well as to researchers in these fields who would like to tackle the topic as a whole and seek inspiration for its further development.