Offers an overview of the development of numbers, their expression in mathematics and measurement, and profiles of the visionaries who saw order amidst the numbers.
This book provides a coherent description of the main concepts and statistical methods used to analyse economic performance. The focus is on measures of performance that are of practical relevance to policy makers. Most, if not all, of these measures can be viewed as measures of productivity and/or efficiency. Linking fields as diverse as index number theory, data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis, the book explains how to compute measures of input and output quantity change that are consistent with measurement theory. It then discusses ways in which meaningful measures of productivity change can be decomposed into measures of technical progress, environmental change, and different types of efficiency change. The book is aimed at graduate students, researchers, statisticians, accountants and economists working in universities, regulatory authorities, government departments and private firms. The book contains many numerical examples. Computer codes and datasets are available on a companion website.
The past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship on dress in the ancient world. These recent studies have established the extent to which Greece and Rome were vestimentary cultures, and they have demonstrated the critical role dress played in communicating individuals’ identities, status, and authority. Despite this emerging interest in ancient dress, little work has been done to understand religious aspects and uses of dress. This volume aims to fill this gap by examining a diverse range of religious sources, including literature, art, performance, coinage, economic markets, and memories. Employing theoretical frames from a range of disciplines, contributors to the volume demonstrate how dress developed as a topos within Judean and Christian rhetoric, symbolism, and performance from the first century BCE to the fifth century CE. Specifically, they demonstrate how religious meanings were entangled with other social logics, revealing the many layers of meaning attached to ancient dress, as well as the extent to which dress was implicated in numerous domains of ancient religious life.
The dynamism of the natural world means that it is constantly changing, sometimes rapidly, sometimes gradually. By mathematically interpreting the continuous change that characterizes so many natural processes, analysis and calculus have become indispensable to bridging the divide between mathematics and the sciences. This comprehensive volume examines the key concepts of calculus, providing students with a robust understanding of integration and differentiation. Biographies of important figures will leave readers with an increased appreciation for the sometimes competing theories that informed the early history of the field.
The field of mathematics today represents an ongoing global effort, spanning both countries and centuries. Through this in-depth narrative, students will learn how major mathematical concepts were first derived, as well as how they evolved with the advent of later thinkers shedding new light on various applications. Everything from Euclidean geometry to the philosophy of mathematics is illuminated as readers are transported to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and beyond to discover the history of mathematical thought
This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.