As significant economic, social, political, and cultural transformations swept the Jewish population of Tsarist Russia and Congress Poland between 1860 and 1914, the Yiddish language (Zhargon) began to gain recognition as a central part of the Jewish cultural stage. Yiddish Transformed examines the secular reading habits of East-European Jews as the Jewish community began shifting to a modern society. Author Nathan Cohen explores Jewish reading practices alongside the ris...

This is a collection of articles, many written by people who worked with Mandelbrot, memorializing the remarkable breadth and depth of his work in science and the arts. Contributors include mathematicians, physicists, biologists, economists, and engineers, as expected; and also artists, musicians, teachers, an historian, an architect, a filmmaker, and a comic. Some articles are quite technical, others entirely descriptive. All include stories about Benoit.Also included are chapters on frac...

More than one-third of Americans could not sustain a basic livelihood without government assistance. Almost 60 percent of seniors are dependent on the government. Why is this? This book examines how the U.S. economy's failure to deliver high-quality, universally accessible basic necessities is creating acute financial insecurity among the American middle class.Over the past 30 years, America's middle class has grown more financially insecure. How much of this press...

Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are The Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about busines...

What are your chances of dying on your next flight, being called for jury duty, or winning the lottery? We all encounter probability problems in our everyday lives. In this collection of twenty-one puzzles, Paul Nahin challenges us to think creatively about the laws of probability as they apply in playful, sometimes deceptive, ways to a fascinating array of speculative situations. Games of Russian roulette, problems involving the accumulation of insects on flypaper, and strategies for dete...

New York Times bestselling author Danica McKellar makes it a breeze to excel in high school geometry!Hollywood actress and math whiz Danica McKellar has completely shattered the “math nerd” stereotype. For years, she’s been showing girls how to feel confident and ace their math classes—with style! With Girls Get Curves, she applies her winning techniques to high school geometry, giving readers the tools they need to feel great and totally “get” ev...

Randomized algorithms have become a central part of the algorithms curriculum, based on their increasingly widespread use in modern applications. This book presents a coherent and unified treatment of probabilistic techniques for obtaining high probability estimates on the performance of randomized algorithms. It covers the basic toolkit from the Chernoff–Hoeffding bounds to more sophisticated techniques like martingales and isoperimetric inequalities, as well as some recent developments l...

The purpose of this volume is to give an up-to-date introduction to tensor valuations and their applications. Starting with classical results concerning scalar-valued valuations on the families of convex bodies and convex polytopes, it proceeds to the modern theory of tensor valuations. Product and Fourier-type transforms are introduced and various integral formulae are derived. New and well-known results are presented, together with generalizations in several directions, including extensi...

This volume contains nine survey articles based on the invited lectures given at the 24th British Combinatorial Conference, held at Royal Holloway, University of London in July 2013. This biennial conference is a well-established international event, with speakers from around the world. The volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research in several areas of combinatorics, including graph theory, matroid theory and automatic counting, as well as connections to coding theory and B...

This textbook for courses on function data analysis and shape data analysis describes how to define, compare, and mathematically represent shapes, with a focus on statistical modeling and inference. It is aimed at graduate students in analysis in statistics, engineering, applied mathematics, neuroscience, biology, bioinformatics, and other related areas. The interdisciplinary nature of the broad range of ideas covered—from introductory theory to algorithmic implementations and some statist...

The self-avoiding walk is a classical model in statistical mechanics, probability theory and mathematical physics. It is also a simple model of polymer entropy which is useful in modelling phase behaviour in polymers. This monograph provides an authoritative examination of interacting self-avoiding walks, presenting aspects of the thermodynamic limit, phase behaviour, scaling and critical exponents for lattice polygons, lattice animals and surfaces. It also includes a comprehensive account...

These lecture notes study the interplay between randomness and geometry of graphs. The first part of the notes reviews several basic geometric concepts, before moving on to examine the manifestation of the underlying geometry in the behavior of random processes, mostly percolation and random walk.The study of the geometry of infinite vertex transitive graphs, and of Cayley graphs in particular, is fairly well developed. One goal of these notes is to point to some random metric spac...