How To Guard An Art Gallery

An “accessible and engaging” tool for understanding the branch of mathematics that is so crucial to modern computer science, using real-life problems (Mathematical Reviews). What is the maximum number of pizza slices one can get by making four straight cuts through a circular pizza? How does a computer determine the best set of pixels to represent a straight line on a computer screen? How many people at a minimum does it take to guard an art gallery? Discrete mathematics has the answer to these—and many other—questions of picking, choosing, and shuffling. T. S. Michael’s gem of a book brings this vital but tough-to-teach subject to life using examples from the real world and popular culture. Each chapter uses one problem—such as slicing a pizza—to detail key concepts about counting numbers and arranging finite sets. Michael takes a different perspective in tackling each of eight problems and explains them in differing degrees of generality, showing in the process how the same mathematical concepts appear in varied guises and contexts. In doing so, he imparts a broader understanding of the ideas underlying discrete mathematics and helps readers appreciate and understand mathematical thinking and discovery. This book explains the basic concepts of discrete mathematics and demonstrates how to apply them in largely nontechnical language. The explanations and formulas can be grasped with a basic understanding of linear equations.

Art gallery theorems and algorithms are so called because they relate to problems involving the visibility of geometrical shapes and their internal surfaces. This book explores generalizations and specializations in these areas. Among the presentations are recently discovered theorems on orthogonal polygons, polygons with holes, exterior visibility, visibility graphs, and visibility in three dimensions. The author formulates many open problems and offers several conjectures, providing arguments which may be followed by anyone familiar with basic graph theory and algorithms. This work may be applied to robotics and artificial intelligence as well as other fields, and will be especially useful to computer scientists working with computational and combinatorial geometry.

Plenty of examples and case studies utilize Mathematica 7's newest tools, such as dynamic manipulations and adaptive three-dimensional plotting. Emphasizes the breadth of Mathematica and the impressive results of combining techniques from different areas. Whenever possible, the book shows how Mathematica can be used to discover new things. Striking examples include the design of a road on which a square wheel bike can ride, the design of a drill that can drill square holes, and new and surprising formulas for p. Visualization is emphasized throughout, with finely crafted graphics in each chapter.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures, WADS 2007, held in Halifax, Canada, in August 2007. The papers present original research on the theory and application of algorithms and data structures in all areas, including combinatorics, computational geometry, databases, graphics, parallel and distributed computing.

Computational geometry emerged from the field of algorithms design and anal ysis in the late 1970s. It has grown into a recognized discipline with its own journals, conferences, and a large community of active researchers. The suc cess of the field as a research discipline can on the one hand be explained from the beauty of the problems studied and the solutions obtained, and, on the other hand, by the many application domains--computer graphics, geographic in formation systems (GIS), robotics, and others-in which geometric algorithms play a fundamental role. For many geometric problems the early algorithmic solutions were either slow or difficult to understand and implement. In recent years a number of new algorithmic techniques have been developed that improved and simplified many of the previous approaches. In this textbook we have tried to make these modem algorithmic solutions accessible to a large audience. The book has been written as a textbook for a course in computational geometry, but it can also be used for self-study.

A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew. To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns. In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.

Graph coloring is one of the oldest and best-known problems of graph theory. As people grew accustomed to applying the tools of graph theory to the solutions of real-world technological and organizational problems, new chromatic models emerged as a natural way of tackling many practical situations. Statistics show that graph coloring is one of the central issues in the collection of several hundred classical combinatorial problems. This book is devoted to problems in graph coloring,which can be viewed as one area of discrete optimization. Chapters are dedicated to various models and are largely independent of one another. In each chapter, the author highlights algorithmic aspects of the presented models, i.e., the construction of polynomial-time algorithms for graph coloring.This is an expanded and updated translation of the prizewinning book originally published in Polish, Optymalizacja dyskretna. Modele i metody kolorowania grafow. It is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in graph theory.