Structure And Randomness

"In 2007, Terry Tao began a mathematical blog, as an outgrowth of his own website at UCLA. This book is based on a selection of articles from the first year of that blog. These articles discuss a wide range of mathematics and its applications, ranging from expository articles on quantum mechanics, Einstein's equation E = mc[superscript 2], or compressed sensing, to open problems in analysis, combinatorics, geometry, number theory, and algebra, to lecture series on random matrices, Fourier analysis, or the dichotomy between structure and randomness that is present in many subfields of mathematics, to more philosophical discussions on such topics as the interplay between finitary and infinitary in analysis. Some selected commentary from readers of the blog has also been included at the end of each article.

Space, structure, and randomness: these are the three key concepts underlying Georges Matheron’s scientific work. He first encountered them at the beginning of his career when working as a mining engineer, and then they resurfaced in fields ranging from meteorology to microscopy. What could these radically different types of applications possibly have in common? First, in each one only a single realisation of the phenomenon is available for study, but its features repeat themselves in space; second, the sampling pattern is rarely regular, and finally there are problems of change of scale. This volume is divided in three sections on random sets, geostatistics and mathematical morphology. They reflect his professional interests and his search for underlying unity. Some readers may be surprised to find theoretical chapters mixed with applied ones. We have done this deliberately. GM always considered that the distinction between the theory and practice was purely academic. When GM tackled practical problems, he used his skill as a physicist to extract the salient features and to select variables which could be measured meaningfully and whose values could be estimated from the available data. Then he used his outstanding ability as a mathematician to solve the problems neatly and efficiently. It was his capacity to combine a physicist’s intuition with a mathematician’s analytical skills that allowed him to produce new and innovative solutions to difficult problems. The book should appeal to graduate students and researchers working in mathematics, probability, statistics, physics, spatial data analysis, and image analysis. In addition it will be of interest to those who enjoy discovering links between scientific disciplines that seem unrelated at first glance. In writing the book the contributors have tried to put GM’s ideas into perspective. During his working life, GM was a genuinely creative scientist. He developed innovative concepts whose usefulness goes far beyond the confines of the discipline for which they were originally designed. This is why his work remains as pertinent today as it was when it was first written.

This volume presents some exciting new developments occurring on the interface between set theory and computability as well as their applications in algebra, analysis and topology. These include effective versions of Borel equivalence, Borel reducibility and Borel determinacy. It also covers algorithmic randomness and dimension, Ramsey sets and Ramsey spaces. Many of these topics are being discussed in the NSF-supported annual Southeastern Logic Symposium.

​This book collects some surveys on current trends in discrete mathematics and discrete geometry. The areas covered include: graph representations, structural graphs theory, extremal graph theory, Ramsey theory and constrained satisfaction problems.

Rare Earth Elements (REE) as well as tantalum and niobium are of tremendous importance because of their specific high-technology applications. The contributions gathered in this volume give an up-to-date survey on the mineralogy, primary ore deposits, prospecting, processing and applications of REE, Ta, and Nd, making this volume a useful handbook for practitioners and students. Finally, the comprehensive coverage of the fundamental aspects, especially as regards REE as tracers of geological phenomena, will prove extremely helpful.

The field of random matrix theory has seen an explosion of activity in recent years, with connections to many areas of mathematics and physics. However, this makes the current state of the field almost too large to survey in a single book. In this graduate text, we focus on one specific sector of the field, namely the spectral distribution of random Wigner matrix ensembles (such as the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble), as well as iid matrix ensembles. The text is largely self-contained and starts with a review of relevant aspects of probability theory and linear algebra. With over 200 exercises, the book is suitable as an introductory text for beginning graduate students seeking to enter the field.

Point processes and random measures find wide applicability in telecommunications, earthquakes, image analysis, spatial point patterns, and stereology, to name but a few areas. The authors have made a major reshaping of their work in their first edition of 1988 and now present their Introduction to the Theory of Point Processes in two volumes with sub-titles Elementary Theory and Models and General Theory and Structure. Volume One contains the introductory chapters from the first edition, together with an informal treatment of some of the later material intended to make it more accessible to readers primarily interested in models and applications. The main new material in this volume relates to marked point processes and to processes evolving in time, where the conditional intensity methodology provides a basis for model building, inference, and prediction. There are abundant examples whose purpose is both didactic and to illustrate further applications of the ideas and models that are the main substance of the text.

Introduction -- Array-based lists -- Linked lists -- Skiplists -- Hash tables -- Binary trees -- Random binary search trees -- Scapegoat trees -- Red-black trees -- Heaps -- Sorting algorithms -- Graphs -- Data structures for integers -- External memory searching.