Experiments In Topology

Classic, lively explanation of one of the byways of mathematics. Klein bottles, Moebius strips, projective planes, map coloring, problem of the Koenigsberg bridges, much more, described with clarity and wit.

"A mathematician named Klein Thought the Moebius band was divine. Said he: 'If you glue The edges of two, You'll get a weird bottle like mine.' " — Stephen Barr In this lively book, the classic in its field, a master of recreational topology invites readers to venture into such tantalizing topological realms as continuity and connectedness via the Klein bottle and the Moebius strip. Beginning with a definition of topology and a discussion of Euler's theorem, Mr. Barr brings wit and clarity to these topics: New Surfaces (Orientability, Dimension, The Klein Bottle, etc.) The Shortest Moebius Strip The Conical Moebius Strip The Klein Bottle The Projective Plane (Symmetry) Map Coloring Networks (Koenigsberg Bridges, Betti Numbers, Knots) The Trial of the Punctured Torus Continuity and Discreteness ("Next Number," Continuity, Neighborhoods, Limit Points) Sets (Valid or Merely True? Venn Diagrams, Open and Closed Sets, Transformations, Mapping, Homotopy) With this book and a square sheet of paper, the reader can make paper Klein bottles, step by step; then, by intersecting or cutting the bottle, make Moebius strips. Conical Moebius strips, projective planes, the principle of map coloring, the classic problem of the Koenigsberg bridges, and many more aspects of topology are carefully and concisely illuminated by the author's informal and entertaining approach. Now in this inexpensive paperback edition, Experiments in Topology belongs in the library of any math enthusiast with a taste for brainteasing adventures

The eld of wireless sensor networks continues to evolve and grow in both practical and research domains. More and more wireless sensor networks are being used to gather information in real life applications. It is common to see how this technology is being applied in irrigation systems, intelligent buildings, bridges, security mec- nisms,militaryoperations,transportation-relatedapplications,etc.Atthesametime, new developments in hardware, software, and communication technologies are - panding these possibilities. As in any other technology, research brings new dev- opments and re nements and continuous improvements of current approaches that push the technology even further. Looking toward the future, the technology seems even more promising in two directions. First, a few years from now more powerful wireless sensor devices will be available, and wireless sensor networks will have applicability in an endless number of scenarios, as they will be able to handle traf c loads not possible today, make more computations, store more data, and live longer because of better energy sources. Second,a few years from now, the opposite scenario might also be possible. The availability of very constrained, nanotechnology-made wireless sensor devices will bring a whole new world of applications, as they will be able to operate in - vironments and places unimaginable today. These two scenarios, at the same time, will both bring new research challenges that are always welcome to researchers.

This book discusses the challenges in the convergence of technologies as the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves. These include sensing, computing, information processing, networking, and controlling intelligent technologies. The contributors first provide a survey of various assessment and evaluation approaches available for successful convergence. They then go on to cover several operational ideas to apply. The contributors then discuss the challenges involved bridging gaps in computation and the communication process, hidden networks, intelligent decision making, human-to-machine perception and large-scale IoT environments. The contributors aim to provide the reader an overview of trends in IoT in terms of performability and traffic modeling and efforts that can be spent in assessing the graceful degradation in IoT paradigms. Provides a survey of IoT assessment and evaluation approaches; Covers new and innovative operational ideas that apply to the IoT industry and the industries it affects; Includes chapters from researchers and industry leaders in IoT from around the world.

Geometry and topology are subjects generally considered to be "pure" mathematics. Recently, however, some of the methods and results in these two areas have found new utility in both wet-lab science (biology and chemistry) and theoretical physics. Conversely, science is influencing mathematics, from posing questions that call for the construction of mathematical models to exporting theoretical methods of attack on long-standing problems of mathematical interest. Based on an AMS Short Course held in January 1992, this book contains six introductory articles on these intriguing new connections. There are articles by a chemist and a biologist about mathematics, and four articles by mathematicians writing about science and mathematics involved. Because this book communicates the excitement and utility of mathematics research at an elementary level, it is an excellent textbook in an advanced undergraduate mathematics course.

Visual shape analysis plays a fundamental role in perception by man and by computer, allowing for inferences about properties of objects and scenes in the physical world. Mathematical approaches to describing visual form can benefit from the use of representations that simultaneously capture properties of an object's outline as well as its interior. Motivated by the success of medial models, this doctoral thesis revisits a quantity related to medial axis computations, the average outward flux of the gradient of the Euclidean distance function from a boundary, and then addresses three distinct problems using this measure. First, I consider the problem of view sphere partitioning for view-based object recognition from sparse views. View-based 3D object recognition requires a selection of model object views against which to match a query view. Ideally, for this to be computationally efficient, such a selection should be sparse. To address this problem, I introduce a novel hierarchical partitioning of the view sphere into regions within which the silhouette of a model object is qualitatively unchanged. To achieve this, I propose a part-based abstraction of a skeleton, as a graph, dubbed the Flux Graph, which allows for views to be grouped. Next, I consider the problem of mapping an initially-unknown 2D environment from possibly noisy sensed samples via an on-line procedure which robustly computes a retraction of its boundaries to obtain a topological representation. Here I motto an algorithm that allows for online map construction with loop closure. I demonstrate that the proposed method allows the robot to localize itself on a partially constructed map to calculate a path to unexplored parts of the environment (frontiers), to compute a robust terminating condition when the robot has fully explored the environment, and finally to achieve loop closure detection. I also show that the resulting map is stable under disturbances to the sensed boundary, and to variations in starting locations for exploration. Finally, I consider the problem of scene categorization from complex line drawings. In the context of human vision, we show that local ribbon symmetry between neighboring pairs of contours facilitates the categorization of complex real-world environments by human observers. In the context of computer vision, I demonstrate a high level of performance in the problem of convolutional neural network-based recognition of natural scenes from line drawings, even in the absence of color, texture and shading information.

A highly valued resource for those who wish to move from the introductory and preliminary understandings and the measurement of chaotic behavior to a more sophisticated and precise understanding of chaotic systems. The authors provide a deep understanding of the structure of strange attractors, how they are classified, and how the information required to identify and classify a strange attractor can be extracted from experimental data. In its first edition, the Topology of Chaos has been a valuable resource for physicist and mathematicians interested in the topological analysis of dynamical systems. Since its publication in 2002, important theoretical and experimental advances have put the topological analysis program on a firmer basis. This second edition includes relevant results and connects the material to other recent developments. Following significant improvements will be included: * A gentler introduction to the topological analysis of chaotic systems for the non expert which introduces the problems and questions that one commonly encounters when observing a chaotic dynamics and which are well addressed by a topological approach: existence of unstable periodic orbits, bifurcation sequences, multistability etc. * A new chapter is devoted to bounding tori which are essential for achieving generality as well as for understanding the influence of boundary conditions. * The new edition also reflects the progress which had been made towards extending topological analysis to higher-dimensional systems by proposing a new formalism where evolving triangulations replace braids. * There has also been much progress in the understanding of what is a good representation of a chaotic system, and therefore a new chapter is devoted to embeddings. * The chapter on topological analysis program will be expanded to cover traditional measures of chaos. This will help to connect those readers who are familiar with those measures and tests to the more sophisticated methodologies discussed in detail in this book. * The addition of the Appendix with both frequently asked and open questions with answers gathers the most essential points readers should keep in mind and guides to corresponding sections in the book. This will be of great help to those who want to selectively dive into the book and its treatments rather than reading it cover to cover. What makes this book special is its attempt to classify real physical systems (e.g. lasers) using topological techniques applied to real date (e.g. time series). Hence it has become the experimenter?s guidebook to reliable and sophisticated studies of experimental data for comparison with candidate relevant theoretical models, inevitable to physicists, mathematicians, and engineers studying low-dimensional chaotic systems.