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As long as a branch of knowledge offers an abundance of problems, it is full of vitality. David Hilbert Over the last 15 years I have given lectures on a variety of problems in nonlinear functional analysis and its applications. In doing this, I have recommended to my students a number of excellent monographs devoted to specialized topics, but there was no complete survey-type exposition of nonlinear functional analysis making available a quick survey to the wide range of readers including mathematicians, natural scientists, and engineers who have only an elementary knowledge of linear functional analysis. I have tried to close this gap with my five-part lecture notes, the first three parts ...
When the Tyrian princess Dido landed on the North African shore of the Mediterranean sea she was welcomed by a local chieftain. He offered her all the land that she could enclose between the shoreline and a rope of knotted cowhide. While the legend does not tell us, we may assume that Princess Dido arrived at the correct solution by stretching the rope into the shape of a circular arc and thereby maximized the area of the land upon which she was to found Carthage. This story of the founding of Carthage is apocryphal. Nonetheless it is probably the first account of a problem of the kind that inspired an entire mathematical discipline, the calculus of variations and its extensions such as the ...
This book is a self-contained text devoted to the numerical determination of optimal inputs for system identification. It presents the current state of optimal inputs with extensive background material on optimization and system identification. The field of optimal inputs has been an area of considerable research recently with important advances by R. Mehra, G. c. Goodwin, M. Aoki, and N. E. Nahi, to name just a few eminent in vestigators. The authors' interest in optimal inputs first developed when F. E. Yates, an eminent physiologist, expressed the need for optimal or preferred inputs to estimate physiological parameters. The text assumes no previous knowledge of optimal control theory, nu...
A large amount of work has been done on ordinary differ ential equations with small parameters multiplying deriv atives. This book investigates questions related to the asymptotic calculation of relaxation oscillations, which are periodic solutions formed of sections of both sl- and fast-motion parts of phase trajectories. A detailed discussion of solutions of differential equations involving small parameters is given for regions near singular points. The main results examined were obtained by L.S. Pontryagin and the authors. Other works have also been taken into account: A.A. Dorodnitsyn's investigations of Van der Pol's equation, results obtained by N.A. Zheleztsov and L.V. Rodygin concern...
The purpose of this book is to give an introduction to the Laplace transform on the undergraduate level. The material is drawn from notes for a course taught by the author at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Based on classroom experience, an attempt has been made to (1) keep the proofs short, (2) introduce applications as soon as possible, (3) concentrate on problems that are difficult to handle by the older classical methods, and (4) emphasize periodic phenomena. To make it possible to offer the course early in the curriculum (after differential equations), no knowledge of complex variable theory is assumed. However, since a thorough study of Laplace. transforms requires at least the ru...
Probability (including stochastic processes) is now being applied to virtually every academic discipline, especially to the sciences. An area of substantial application is that known as operations research or industrial engineering, which incorporates subjects such as queueing theory, optimization, and network flow. This book provides a compact introduction to that field for students with minimal preparation, knowing mainly calculus and having "mathe matical maturity." Beginning with the basics of probability, the develop ment is self-contained but not abstract, that is, without measure theory and its probabilistic counterpart. Although the text is reasonably short, a course based on this bo...
By studying six different aspects of culture in Canton in the period between the two World Wars, this book helps broaden our limited knowledge of the social and cultural lives of the common people in this largest city of South China. The author examines how the Cantonese in this periodindulged in their imagined cultural superiority as "modern" citizens, ushering in a cult of the modern city. During this period, Cantonese opera was also emerging and evolving into a widely accepted form of commercialised mass entertainment. The process of social and cultural change and its impacton the development of this city and its people are revealed throughout the book. This book also aims to redress some...
The author offers a systematic and careful development of many aspects of structural optimization, particularly for beams and plates. Some of the results are new and some have appeared only in specialized Soviet journals, or as pro ceedings of conferences, and are not easily accessible to Western engineers and mathematicians. Some aspects of the theory presented here, such as optimiza tion of anisotropic properties of elastic structural elements, have not been con sidered to any extent by Western research engineers. The author's treatment is "classical", i.e., employing classical analysis. Classical calculus of variations, the complex variables approach, and the Kolosov Muskhelishvili theory...