springer nov 2006 (493 risultati)

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 180 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The same is true of applications of game theory to history, philosophy religion, and the other humanities. In particular, I know of no attempts to apply game theory to the kinds of p- losophy-of-religion and theology questions that I explored in Superior Beings, By contrast; the nexus between science and religion has been thoroughly analyzed using other methods of inquiry as evidenced by Charles L. Harper Jr (ed. ), Spiritual Information: 100 Perspectives on Science and Religion (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006), a huge collection put together in honor of Sir John Templeton's ninetieth birthday Sir John, through the Templeton Foundation, is the primary propo nent and the major benefactor of studies in science and religion today How science and religion are (or are not) connected is, of course, an old subject. It is also a controversial one, extending at least from Galileo's trial in 1633 to the teaching of evolution today. While game theory is a mathematical theory, Superior Beings is emphatically not a scientific work, wherein a theory is tested. Rather, it is an attempt to interpret and explain important philo sophical, religious, and theological questions in terms of the rational choices of ordinary human beings, who are assumed to play games with a superior being. The game theory I use is nonstandard.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The proper study of mankind is not merely Man, but Intelligence. 1 -Arthur C. Clarke, 1951 In the long-running television series 'The X-Files,' the original Deep Throat said to FBI Special Agent Mulder that 'there are those like yourself who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life.' Ah, but that's not the question. If extraterrestrial life exists, most of it may be in simpler forms comparable to the one-celled organisms of Earth biology. Finding such life would be fascinating for scientists, but may be of only passing interest to the general public. What intrigues the average citizen is the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. We want to communicate with other sentient beings, learning what they know and telling them about ourselves. We want to nd out how they are like us and how they are different. Microorganisms don't have a lot to say. There is another implication of contact that underlies this book: Intel- gent extraterrestrials might have an impact on our future. The information they send us-if any-might change our cultures. They could have c- scious intentions toward us, and possibly the technologies to reach us directly. Their intentions may be benign-or not. Our interest in alien minds is not new. The idea that intelligent beings exist beyond the Earth has been part of the Western intellectual tradition for more than 2000 years. Sometimes this belief was widespread; at other times, it was out of fashion.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The biennial PAKM Conference Series o ers a communication platform and meeting ground for practitioners and researchers involved in developing and deploying advanced business solutions for the management of knowledge in - ganizations. PAKM is a forum for people to share their views, exchange ideas, develop new insights, and envision completely new kinds of knowledge mana- ment solutions. PAKM 2006, the Sixth International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management, was held again in Vienna. It was a milestone for two reasons: First, it marked an anniversary ¿ 10 years of PAKM conferences. The rst conference was held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1996, followed by the conf- ences in 1998 and 2000, in Basel as well. After that PAKM moved to Vienna where it was held in 2002, 2004, and 2006. Secondly, from now on PAKM will be ¿on tour¿: It will be organized by di erent people and be hosted at di erent places all over the world. The PAKM Steering Committee will be responsible for selecting the conference chairs and the conference locations. The Steering Committee will also be responsible for the direction the PAKM conferences will take and will ensure their continuing high quality. For this year¿s conference we received 123 submissions from 30 countries. 360 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -A majority of the chapters in this book first saw the light of day as talks at a conference organised and held at Queen¿s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada in April 2001. This small, invitational meeting, tellingly entitled Beauty and the Mathematical Beast, brought together a range of academics int- ested in and committed to exploring connections between mathematics and aesthetics. The enthusiastic response of participants at this gathering enco- aged the presenters to expand upon their initial contributions and persuaded the organisers to recruit further chapters in order to bring a greater balance to the whole. The timing of this event was not arbitrary. The preceding decade had seen a resurgence in serious writing dealing with deeper relations between mathematics (and science) and ¿the beautiful¿. In many ways, we the editors of this volume found these contributions to the literature were revisiting and drawing on themes that had been prominent over two thousand five h- dred years ago, in certain writings of the Pythagoreans. While not intending to offer a historical reappraisal of these ancient thinkers here, we have none the less chosen to invoke this profound interweaving of the mathematical and the aesthetic to which this reputedly secretive philosophical sect was ext- sively attuned. This book is divided into three sections comprising three chapters each, each with its own short introduction discussing the particular chapters within.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 308 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -These proceedings contain the papers selected for presentation at the sixth edition of the International Symposium on Web & Wireless Geographical Information Systems held in Hong Kong during December 2006. This symposium was intended to provide an up-to-date review of advances in both theoretical and technical development of 2 Web and Wireless Geographical Information Systems (W GIS). It was the sixth in a series of successful events beginning with Kyoto 2001, and alternating locations annually between East Asia and Europe. It now represents an ever-increasing spatially aware geotechnology research community. Now in its sixth year, W2GIS has matured in name from a ¿workshop¿ to a full 2-day ¿symposium¿ ¿ recognition by the field as a forum for quality dissemination and discussion on the latest research and development achievements in the domain. The number of papers received for this symposium demonstrates not only the growing importance of this field for researchers but also the growing impact these developments have in the daily lives of all citizens. From well over 130 submissions, 72 papers were initially selected as being directly in scope with the symposium, and from these, 24 papers (33%) were selected for final presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. Each paper received three reviews and was ranked accordingly. The accepted papers cover a wide range of topics from the Semantic Web, Web personalization, contextual representation and mapping to querying in mobile environments, mobile networks and recent developments in location-based services and applications.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 284 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th International Conference on the Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, FSTTCS 2006, held in Kolkata, India, in December 2006. It contains 38 papers that cover a broad variety of current topics from the theory of computing, ranging from formal methods, discrete mathematics, complexity theory, and automata theory to theoretical computer science in general. 452 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL) was born in Hong Kongin 1998and hosted in Taipei (1999),Seoul(2000),Bangalore(2001), Singapore (2002), Kuala Lumpur (2003), Shanghai (2004) and Bangkok (2005). ICADL 2006 held in Kyoto, Japan was the 9th of the ICADL series. ICADL has been recognized as an important event for the digital library communities not only in Asia but also globally. The primary mission of ICADL, like the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) and European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL), is to serve as a forum for exchange of new advanced te- nologies and ideas among researchers and practitioners. In addition, ICADL as a conference based in Asia is an important event not only for people in dev- oped countries but also in developing countries where there is large diversity in culture, language and development. ICADL 2006received170papersubmissionsfrom23countries.Everysubm- sion was reviewed by at least three reviewers. The Program Committee selected 46 full papers and 14 short papers based on the quality and contribution to digital library research. ICADL as well as JCDL and ECDL cover a wide range of information technologies for digital libraries as well as the human and social aspects of digital libraries. The topics of the papers in the proceedings include information extraction, information retrieval, metadata, architectures for di- tal libraries and archives, ontologies, information seeking, cultural heritage and e-learning.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 592 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, OPODIS 2006, held at Bordeaux, France, in December 2006. The 28 revised full papers presented together with two invited talks address all current issues in theory, specification, design and implementation of distributed and embedded systems. 460 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -China is the world¿s largest power region, achieving economic growth rates that exceed those of most industrialized countries. Joining the WTO unleashed the powerful 'dragon' of Eastern Asia and Chinese markets are expected to grow even faster in the coming years. International companies looking to start or extend business in China are finding exciting new opportunities. Yet these opportunities do not come without serious challenges.In this book practitioners of international companies are offered valuable insights and lessons from established and successful managers, academics and consultants. The book is divided into three parts: 'Opportunities and Challenges in China', 'Strategies for Market Entry and Business Success' and 'Practical Insights from China'. It covers a variety of topics such as business strategies, branding, pricing, market research, legal constraints and successful business relations. It also takes a closer look at best practices from Volkswagen, Allianz and MAN Roland.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 284 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -In the last years electronic markets, especially online auctions, have become very popular and received more and more attention in both, business (B2B) as well as in public practice (B2C and C2C). Science, however, is still far from having studied all phenomena and effects which can be observed on electronic markets. Apart from theoretic analysis, other approaches are necessary to evaluate and understand market effects. This book shows that and how software agents can be used to simulate bidding behaviour in electronic auctions.The main emphasis of this book is to apply computational economics to market theory. It summarizes the most common and up-to-date agent-based simulation methods and tools and develops the simulation software AMASE. On basis of the introduced methods a model is established to simulate bidding behaviour under uncertainty.The book addresses researchers, computer scientists, economists and students who are interested in applying agent-based computational methods to electronic markets. It helps to learn more about simulations in economics in general and common agent-based methods and tools in particular. The reader finds basic definitions and learns how to build an appropriate model for the posed research question. It is the first time that quantitative results are presented for the problem of valuation uncertainty. These results significantly contribute to existing research in computational economics and supplements interesting research aspects.Springer Basel AG in Springer Science + Business Media, Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin 260 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This volume, the 7th in the Transactions on Computational Systems Biology series, contains a fully refereed and carefully selected set of papers from two workshops: BioConcur 2004 held in London, UK in August 2004 and BioConcur 2005 held in San Francisco, CA, USA in August 2005. The 8 papers chosen for this special issue are devoted to various aspects of computational methods, algorithms, and techniques in bioinformatics.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 196 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Privacy in statistical databases is a discipline whose purpose is to provide - lutions to the con ict between the increasing social, political and economical demand of accurate information, and the legal and ethical obligation to protect the privacy of the individuals and enterprises to which statistical data refer. - yond law and ethics, there are also practical reasons for statistical agencies and data collectors to invest in this topic: if individual and corporate respondents feel their privacyguaranteed,they arelikelyto providemoreaccurateresponses. There are at least two traditions in statistical database privacy: one stems from o cial statistics, where the discipline is also known as statistical disclosure control (SDC), and the other originates from computer science and database technology.Bothstartedinthe1970s,butthe1980sandtheearly1990ssawlittle privacy activity on the computer science side. The Internet era has strengthened the interest of both statisticians and computer scientists in this area. Along with the traditional topics of tabular and microdata protection, some research lines have revived and/or appeared, such as privacy in queryable databases and protocols for private data computation. 404 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book describes a family of algorithms for studying the global structure of systems. By a finite covering of the phase space we construct a directed graph with vertices corresponding to cells of the covering and edges corresponding to admissible transitions. The method is used, among other things, to locate the periodic orbits and the chain recurrent set, to construct the attractors and their basins, to estimate the entropy, and more.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 304 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -A principal ingredient in the proof of the Moonshine Theorem, connecting the Monster group to modular forms, is the infinite dimensional Lie algebra of physical states of a chiral string on an orbifold of a 26 dimensional torus, called the Monster Lie algebra. It is a Borcherds-Kac-Moody Lie algebra with Lorentzian root lattice; and has an associated automorphic form having a product expansion describing its structure. Lie superalgebras are generalizations of Lie algebras, useful for depicting supersymmetry ¿ the symmetry relating fermions and bosons. Most known examples of Lie superalgebras with a related automorphic form such as the Fake Monster Lie algebra whose reflection group is given by the Leech lattice arise from (super)string theory and can be derived from lattice vertex algebras. The No-Ghost Theorem from dual resonance theory and a conjecture of Berger-Li-Sarnak on the eigenvalues of the hyperbolic Laplacian provide strong evidence that they are of rank at most 26.The aim of this book is to give the reader the tools to understand the ongoing classification and construction project of this class of Lie superalgebras and is ideal for a graduate course. The necessary background is given within chapters or in appendices.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 300 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Examining the relationship between growth and poverty reduction among eight countries in the 1990s and early 2000s, this volume provides important lessons about what has and has not worked in these countries to increase the participation of poor households in growth.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature provides an overview of the main themes, issues and critical perspectives that have had the greatest effect on postcolonial literatures. Discussing historical, cultural and contextual background, it contains selected work of some of the major writers from this period.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Although it has changed considerably in both coverage and length, this book originated from lecture courses at the Ecole Polytechnique. It is useful to re mind non-Prench readers of the special place this institution occupies in our education system, as it has few features in common with institutes with a similar name in other parts of the world. In fact, its programme corresponds to the intermediate years at a university, while the level of the students is particularly high owing to their strict selection through entrance examina tions. The courses put a stress on giving foundations with a balance between the various natural and mathematical sciences, without neglecting general cultural aspects; specialization and technological instruction follow after the students have left the Ecole. The students form a very mixed population, not yet having made their choice of career. Many of them become high-level engineers, covering all branches of industry, some devote themselves to pure or applied research, others become managers or civil servants, and one can find former students of the Ecole amongst generals, the clergy, teachers, and even artists and Presidents of Prance. Several features of the present volume, and in particular its contents, correspond to this variety and to the needs of such an audience. Statistical physics, in the broadest meaning of the term, with its many related disci plines, is an essential element of modern scientific culture.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 632 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This book is based on lectures given at a summer school on motivic homotopy theory at the Sophus Lie Centre in Nordfjordeid, Norway, in August 2002. Aimed at graduate students in algebraic topology and algebraic geometry, it contains background material from both of these fields, as well as the foundations of motivic homotopy theory. It will serve as a good introduction as well as a convenient reference for a broad group of mathematicians to this important and fascinating new subject. Vladimir Voevodsky is one of the founders of the theory and received the Fields medal for his work, and the other authors have all done important work in the subject.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 236 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -This text not only provides a thorough introduction to statistical physics and thermodynamics but also exhibits the universality of the chain of ideas that leads from the laws of microphysics to the macroscopic behaviour of matter. A wide range of applications teaches students how to make use of the concepts, and many exercises will help to deepen their understanding. Drawing on both quantum mechanics and classical physics, the book follows modern research in statistical physics.Volume I discusses in detail the probabilistic description of quantum or classical systems, the Boltzmann-Gibbs distributions, the conservation laws, and the interpretation of entropy as missing information. Thermodynamics and electromagnetism in matter are dealt with, as well as applications to gases, both dilute and condensed, and to phase transitions.This softcover edition accomodates the many requests to make this widely used and often cited classical text available again.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 488 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -The book is an introductory book to radiological English on the basis that there are a lot of radiologists, radiology residents, radiology nurses, radiology students, and radiographers worldwide whose English level is indeterminate because their reading skills are much higher than their fluency. It is intended to help those health care professionals who need English for their work but do not speak English on a day-to-day basis.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 340 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - General relativity is the modern theory of the gravitational eld. It is a deep subject that couples uid dynamics to the geometry of spacetime through the Einstein equations. The subject has seen a resurgence of interest recently, partlybecauseofthespectacularsatellitedatathatcontinuestoshe dnewlight on the nature of the universe. . . Einstein's theory of gravity is still the basic theorywehavetodescribetheexpandinguniverseofgalaxies. ButtheEinstein equations are of great physical, mathematical and intellectual interest in their own right. They are the granddaddy of all modern eld equations, being the rst to describe a eld by curvature, an idea that has impacted all of physics, and that revolutionized the modern theory of elementary particles. In these noteswedescribeamathematicaltheoryofshockwavepropagationingeneral relativity. Shock waves are strong fronts that propagate in uids, and across which there is a rapid change in density, pressure and velocity, and they can bedescribedmathematicallybydiscontinuitiesacrosswhichmass,momentum and energy are conserved. In general relativity, shock waves carry with them a discontinuity in spacetime curvature. The main object of these notes is to introduce and analyze a practical method for numerically computing shock waves in spherically symmetric spacetimes. The method is locally inertial in thesensethatthecurvatureissetequaltozeroineachlocalgridcell. Although it formally appears that the method introduces singularities at shocks, the arguments demonstrate that this is not the case. The third author would like to dedicate these notes to his father, Paul Blake Temple, who piqued the author's interest in Einstein's theory when he was a young boy, and whose interest and encouragement has been an inspirationthroughout his adult life.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - This book is intended for use by students, academicians and practicing engineers who in the course of their daily study or research have need for the probability distributions and associated statistics of random variables that are themselves Gaussian or in various forms derived from them. The format of the book is primarily that of a handbook in that, for the most part, the results are merely presented in their final form without derivation or discussion. As such the reader must rely on the typographical accuracy of the documented expressions, which the author has taken great pains to assure. Also included at the end of the book are numerous curves illustrating the behavior of a variety of the probability measures presented in mathematical form. The author wishes to acknowledge his many colleagues in industry and academia for the encouragement and support they provided for this project without which it might never have gotten started. INTRODUCTION There are certain reference works that engineers and scientists alike find invaluable in their day-to-day work activities. Many of these reference volumes are of a generic nature such as tables of integrals, tables of series, handbooks of mathematical formulas and transforms, etc. (see Refs. 1, 2, 3, and 4 for example), whereas others are collections of technical papers and textbooks that directly relate to the individual's specific field of specialty.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Expressive Order introduces affect control theory to lay readers of sociology, and additionally guides sociology specialists into the theory's deep structure.Briefly, affect control theory proposes that individuals shape their social interactions so that emerging impressions reinforce sentiments about salient identities, behaviors, and settings. Emotions signal how the process of confirming sentiments is going for each individual. The theory explains behaviors, emotions, social labeling, and personality attributions in a wide variety of social contexts - including intimate relations, work-world interactions, courtrooms, and international relations.Part 1 of the book provides a plain-language exposition of the theory, along with numerous interpretive analyses of everyday situations. This is engaging and provocative reading for anyone interested in social relations, including undergraduates in and out of the social sciences.Part 2 presents the mathematical derivations that define sentiment-confirming behavior, labeling, attribution, and emotion. The mathematical solutions, conjoined with understandings about social institutions, are the basis of the theory's explanations. The derivations clarify the theory's assumptions and reasoning, as only mathematics can.Part 3 of Expressive Order describes the research program associated with the theory and the computer simulation software that is used in research. This part of the book offers a jump start for individuals wishing to use affect control theory in their own research.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - This book represents a broad-based approach to a narrow but complex issue. The issue causes distress for many and has been instrumental in family disruption and divorce. Women's sexual desire-whether it is too little or too much-has become an issue of growing concern and vague promises for solution. In the meantime, the women are looking for answers, consulting professionals in the field of human sexuality, physicians or therapists, media advice and self-help books. The material discussed in this book is not part of any structured research. The women encountered in the pages of this book have not been selected on a random basis. Some have been clients, some are volunteers from the general population and another group is made up of undergraduate college students. The college s- dents came from a varied ethnic and cultural background while the clients mainly were of white and African American background. The volunteers were predo- nantly from a white middle-class population. There is no claim that the women are representative of all women in the general population.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -A macroscopic system consists of a tremendous number of microscopic atoms and molecules. In thermal equilibrium the state of such a system is uniquely defined, despite the fact that the microscopic particles behave quite randomly. This observation gives rise to the fundamental law of the statistical physics; it allows entropy to be defined and a framework for the theory to be constructed.The first part of this book explains the essence of statistical physics without going into details such as Liouville¿s theorem or ergodic theorem, which are difficult for beginners and unnecessary for actual application of the statistical mechanics. In the second part, statistical mechanics ís applied to various systems which look different but have the same mathematical structure. In this way readers can deepen their understanding of statistical physics.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 224 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - In one word, this is a responsible book; the rest is commentary. Around 1992 a few of us were led by Charles Bennett into a Garden of Eden of quantum information, communication, and computation. No sooner had we started exploring our surroundings and naming the birds and the beasts, than Peter Shor put an end to that apparent innocence by showing that factoring could be turned-by means of quantum hardware-into a po- nomial task. Fast factoring meant business; everybody seemed to be awfully interested in factoring. Not that anyone had any use for factoring per se, but it seemed that all the world's secrets were protected by factor-keyed padlocks. Think of all the power and the glory (and something else) that you might get by acting as a consultant to big businesses and government agencies, helping them pick everyone else's locks and at the same time build unpickable ones (well, nearly unpickable) for themselves. And if one can get an exponential advantage in factoring, wouldn't an exponential advantage be lying around the corner for practically any other computational task Quantum infor- tion 'and all that' has indeed blossomed in a few years into a wonderful new chapter of physics, comparable in avor and scope to thermodynamics. It has alsoturnedintoaveritable'industry'-producingpapers,conferences,exp- iments, e ects, devices-even proposals for quantum computer architectures.

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - AboutThisBook This book was rst suggested to Springer in 2004, though its origins go back to changes made two years earlier to the structure of the University of Hull's Computer Science programme. At the same time, my own visualization - search was leading towards a systematic view of data and techniques that I felt could be educationally valuable. In 2003 I thus sat down with some trepidation to write a visualization course founded on research in the area but nonetheless accessible to students. This course could, however, involve no mathematics beyond GCSE, in line with university admissions practices of that time. Writing the course involved generating many new illustrations, in the form of both line drawings and visualization screenshots and, wi- ing to get maximum mileage out of this e ort, the idea of writing a book to accompany the course came about. At the University of Hull, our practical visualization teaching is based on IRIS Explorer, an application builder-type package from NAG Ltd. Ori- nally this book was to have been both an introduction to visualization and a handbook for beginners in IRIS Explorer, with 'virtual laboratories' running throughout it to illustrate certain points. Following comments from revi- ers, however, its emphasis has changed.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - This work is a comprehensive and much-needed tool for the teaching and practice of radioanalytical chemistry. It encompasses a concise theoretical background, laboratory work, and data interpretation. It also contains chapters on the most current and visible applications of radioanalytical techniques. Its emphasis on the practical aspects on laboratory setup and operation make it a valuable tool for training professionals and students alike.

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware -Pedagogical insights gained through 30 years of teaching applied mathematics led the author to write this set of student oriented books. Topics such as complex analysis, matrix theory, vector and tensor analysis, Fourier analysis, integral transforms, ordinary and partial differential equations are presented in a discursive style that is readable and easy to follow. Numerous clearly stated, completely worked out examples together with carefully selected problem sets with answers are used to enhance students' understanding and manipulative skill. The goal is to make students comfortable and confident in using advanced mathematical tools in junior, senior, and beginning graduate courses.Springer Verlag GmbH, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69121 Heidelberg 332 pp. Englisch.