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This book results from a unique and innovative program at Pennsylvania State University. Under the program, the ''best of the best'' students nationwide are chosen to study challenging mathematical areas under the guidance of experienced mathematicians. This program, Mathematics Advanced Study Semesters (MASS), offers an unparalleled opportunity for talented undergraduate students who are serious in the pursuit of mathematical knowledge. This volume represents various aspects of the MASS program over its six-year existence, including core courses, summer courses, students' research, and colloquium talks. The book is most appropriate for college professors of mathematics who work with bright and eager undergraduate and beginning graduate students, for such students who want to expand their mathematical horizons, and for everyone who loves mathematics and wants to learn more interesting and unusual material. The first half of the book contains lecture notes of nonstandard courses. A text for a semester-long course on $p$-adic analysis is centered around contrasts and similarities with its real counterpart. A shorter text focuses on a classical area of interplay between geometry, algebra and number theory (continued fractions, hyperbolic geometry and quadratic forms). Also provided are detailed descriptions of two innovative courses, one on geometry and the other on classical mechanics. These notes constitute what one may call the skeleton of a course, leaving the instructor ample room for innovation and improvisation. The second half of the book contains a large collection of essays on a broad spectrum of exciting topics from Hilbert's Fourth Problem to geometric inequalities and minimal surfaces, from mathematical billiards to fractals and tilings, from unprovable theorems to the classification of finite simple groups and lexicographic codes.

The book gives an introduction to $p$-adic numbers from the point of view of number theory, topology, and analysis. Compared to other books on the subject, its novelty is both a particularly balanced approach to these three points of view and an emphasis on topics accessible to undergraduates. In addition, several topics from real analysis and elementary topology which are not usually covered in undergraduate courses (totally disconnected spaces and Cantor sets, points of discontinuity of maps and the Baire Category Theorem, surjectivity of isometries of compact metric spaces) are also included in the book. They will enhance the reader's understanding of real analysis and intertwine the real and $p$-adic contexts of the book. The book is based on an advanced undergraduate course given by the author. The choice of the topic was motivated by the internal beauty of the subject of $p$-adic analysis, an unusual one in the undergraduate curriculum, and abundant opportunities to compare it with its much more familiar real counterpart. The book includes a large number of exercises. Answers, hints, and solutions for most of them appear at the end of the book. Well written, with obvious care for the reader, the book can be successfully used in a topic course or for self-study.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Reachability Problems, RP 2021, held in Liverpool, UK in October 2021. The 6 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. In addition, 4 invited papers were included in this volume. The RP proceedings cover topics such as reachability for infinite state systems; rewriting systems; reachability analysis in counter/timed/cellular/communicating automata; Petri nets; computational aspects of semigroups, groups, and rings; reachability in dynamical and hybrid systems; frontiers between decidable and undecidable reachability problems; complexity and decidability aspects; predictability in iterative maps; and new computational paradigms. Chapter ‘Recent Advances on Reachability Problems for Valence Systems’ is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book presents properties, examples, rigidity theorems and classification results of such Finsler metrics. In particular, this book introduces how to investigate spherically symmetric Finsler geometry using ODE or PDE methods. Spherically symmetric Finsler geometry is a subject that concerns domains in R^n with spherically symmetric metrics. Recently, a significant progress has been made in studying Riemannian-Finsler geometry. However, constructing nice examples of Finsler metrics turn out to be very difficult. In spherically symmetric Finsler geometry, we find many nice examples with special curvature properties using PDE technique. The studying of spherically symmetric geometry shows closed relation among geometry, group and equation.

This fascinating look at combinatorial games, that is, games not involving chance or hidden information, offers updates on standard games such as Go and Hex, on impartial games such as Chomp and Wythoff's Nim, and on aspects of games with infinitesimal values, plus analyses of the complexity of some games and puzzles and surveys on algorithmic game theory, on playing to lose, and on coping with cycles. The volume is rounded out with an up-to-date bibliography by Fraenkel and, for readers eager to get their hands dirty, a list of unsolved problems by Guy and Nowakowski. Highlights include some of Siegel's groundbreaking work on loopy games, the unveiling by Friedman and Landsberg of the use of renormalization to give very intriguing results about Chomp, and Nakamura's "Counting Liberties in Capturing Races of Go." Like its predecessors, this book should be on the shelf of all serious games enthusiasts.

Discusses, from a working mathematician's point of view, the mystery of mathematical intuition: Why are certain mathematical concepts more intuitive than others? And to what extent does the 'small scale' structure of mathematical concepts and algorithms reflect the workings of the human brain?

The Mathematics Advanced Study Semesters (MASS) program offers an opportunity for talented undergraduate students who are serious in the pursuit of mathematical knowledge. This book represents various aspects of the MASS program over its six-year existence, including core courses, summer courses, students' research, and colloquium talks.