Kurt Gödel was an intellectual giant. His Incompleteness Theorem turned not only mathematics but also the whole world of science and philosophy on its head. Shattering hopes that logic would, in the end, allow us a complete understanding of the universe, Gödel's theorem also raised many provocative questions: What are the limits of rational thought? Can we ever fully understand the machines we build? Or the inner workings of our own minds? How should mathematicians proceed in the absence of complete certainty about their results? Equally legendary were Gödel's eccentricities, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his paranoid fear of germs that eventually led to his death from self-starvation. Now, in the first book for a general audience on this strange and brilliant thinker, John Casti and Werner DePauli bring the legend to life.
The material presented in this book corresponds to a semester-long course, ``Linear Algebra and Differential Equations'', taught to sophomore students at UC Berkeley. In contrast with typical undergraduate texts, the book offers a unifying point of view on the subject, namely that linear algebra solves several clearly-posed classification problems about such geometric objects as quadratic forms and linear transformations. This attractive viewpoint on the classical theory agrees well with modern tendencies in advanced mathematics and is shared by many research mathematicians. However, the idea of classification seldom finds its way to basic programs in mathematics, and is usually unfamiliar to undergraduates. To meet the challenge, the book first guides the reader through the entire agenda of linear algebra in the elementary environment of two-dimensional geometry, and prior to spelling out the general idea and employing it in higher dimensions, shows how it works in applications such as linear ODE systems or stability of equilibria. Appropriate as a text for regular junior and honors sophomore level college classes, the book is accessible to high school students familiar with basic calculus, and can also be useful to engineering graduate students.
This authoritative biography of Kurt Goedel relates the life of this most important logician of our time to the development of the field. Goedel's seminal achievements that changed the perception and foundations of mathematics are explained in the context of his life from the turn of the century Austria to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
The class of Schur functions consists of analytic functions on the unit disk that are bounded by $1$. The Schur algorithm associates to any such function a sequence of complex constants, which is much more useful than the Taylor coefficients. There is a generalization to matrix-valued functions and a corresponding algorithm. These generalized Schur functions have important applications to the theory of linear operators, to signal processing and control theory, and to other areas of engineering. In this book, Alpay looks at matrix-valued Schur functions and their applications from the unifying point of view of spaces with reproducing kernels. This approach is used here to study the relationship between the modeling of time-invariant dissipative linear systems and the theory of linear operators. The inverse scattering problem plays a key role in the exposition. The point of view also allows for a natural way to tackle more general cases, such as nonstationary systems, non-positive metrics, and pairs of commuting nonself-adjoint operators. This is the English translation of a volume originally published in French by the Societe Mathematique de France. Translated by Stephen S. Wilson.
"This is the colorful and dramatic biography of two of America's most controversial entrepreneurs: Moses Louis Annenberg, 'the racing wire king, ' who built his fortune in racketeering, invested it in publishing, and lost much of it in the biggest tax evasion case in United States history; and his son, Walter, launcher of TV Guide and Seventeen magazines and former ambassador to Great Britain."--Jacket.
There are incredibly rich connections between classical analysis and number theory. For instance, analytic number theory contains many examples of asymptotic expressions derived from estimates for analytic functions, such as in the proof of the Prime Number Theorem. In combinatorial number theory, exact formulas for number-theoretic quantities are derived from relations between analytic functions. Elliptic functions, especially theta functions, are an important class of such functions in this context, which had been made clear already in Jacobi's Fundamenta nova. Theta functions are also classically connected with Riemann surfaces and with the modular group $\Gamma = \mathrm{PSL (2,\mathbb{Z )$, which provide another path for insights into number theory. Farkas and Kra, well-known masters of the theory of Riemann surfaces and the analysis of theta functions, uncover here interesting combinatorial identities by means of the function theory on Riemann surfaces related to the principal congruence subgroups $\Gamma(k)$. For instance, the authors use this approach to derive congruences discovered by Ramanujan for the partition function, with the main ingredient being the construction of the same function in more than one way. The authors also obtain a variant on Jacobi's famous result on the number of ways that an integer can be represented as a sum of four squares, replacing the squares by triangular numbers and, in the process, obtaining a cleaner result. The recent trend of applying the ideas and methods of algebraic geometry to the study of theta functions and number theory has resulted in great advances in the area. However, the authors choose to stay with the classical point of view. As a result, their statements and proofs are very concrete. In this book the mathematician familiar with the algebraic geometry approach to theta functions and number theory will find many interesting ideas as well as detailed explanations and derivations of new and old results. Highlights of the book include systematic studies of theta constant identities, uniformizations of surfaces represented by subgroups of the modular group, partition identities, and Fourier coefficients of automorphic functions. Prerequisites are a solid understanding of complex analysis, some familiarity with Riemann surfaces, Fuchsian groups, and elliptic functions, and an interest in number theory. The book contains summaries of some of the required material, particularly for theta functions and theta constants. Readers will find here a careful exposition of a classical point of view of analysis and number theory. Presented are numerous examples plus suggestions for research-level problems. The text is suitable for a graduate course or for independent reading.
The study of spatial patterns in extended systems, and their evolution with time, poses challenging questions for physicists and mathematicians alike. Waves on water, pulses in optical fibers, periodic structures in alloys, folds in rock formations, and cloud patterns in the sky: patterns are omnipresent in the world around us. Their variety and complexity make them a rich area of study. In the study of these phenomena an important role is played by well-chosen model equations, which are often simpler than the full equations describing the physical or biological system, but still capture its essential features. Through a thorough analysis of these model equations one hopes to glean a better under standing of the underlying mechanisms that are responsible for the formation and evolution of complex patterns. Classical model equations have typically been second-order partial differential equations. As an example we mention the widely studied Fisher-Kolmogorov or Allen-Cahn equation, originally proposed in 1937 as a model for the interaction of dispersal and fitness in biological populations. As another example we mention the Burgers equation, proposed in 1939 to study the interaction of diffusion and nonlinear convection in an attempt to understand the phenomenon of turbulence. Both of these are nonlinear second-order diffusion equations.
This modern introduction to the foundations of logic and mathematics not only takes theory into account, but also treats in some detail applications that have a substantial impact on everyday life (loans and mortgages, bar codes, public-key cryptography). A first college-level introduction to logic, proofs, sets, number theory, and graph theory, and an excellent self-study reference and resource for instructors.
This book is based on a first-year graduate course I gave three times at the University of Chicago. As it was addressed to graduate students who intended to specialize in mathematics, I tried to put the classical theory of functions of a complex variable in context, presenting proofs and points of view which relate the subject to other branches of mathematics. Complex analysis in one variable is ideally suited to this attempt. Of course, the branches of mathema tics one chooses, and the connections one makes, must depend on personal taste and knowledge. My own leaning towards several complex variables will be apparent, especially in the notes at the end of the different chapters. The first three chapters deal largely with classical material which is avai lable in the many books on the subject. I have tried to present this material as efficiently as I could, and, even here, to show the relationship with other branches of mathematics. Chapter 4 contains a proof of Picard's theorem; the method of proof I have chosen has far-reaching generalizations in several complex variables and in differential geometry. The next two chapters deal with the Runge approximation theorem and its many applications. The presentation here has been strongly influenced by work on several complex variables.
