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This text examines Markov chains whose drift tends to zero at infinity, a topic sometimes labelled as 'Lamperti's problem'. It can be considered a subcategory of random walks, which are helpful in studying stochastic models like branching processes and queueing systems. Drawing on Doob's h-transform and other tools, the authors present novel results and techniques, including a change-of-measure technique for near-critical Markov chains. The final chapter presents a range of applications where these special types of Markov chains occur naturally, featuring a new risk process with surplus-dependent premium rate. This will be a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students working in probability theory and stochastic processes.
This textbook focuses on general topology. Meant for graduate and senior undergraduate mathematics students, it introduces topology thoroughly from scratch and assumes minimal basic knowledge of real analysis and metric spaces. It begins with thought-provoking questions to encourage students to learn about topology and how it is related to, yet different from, geometry. Using concepts from real analysis and metric spaces, the definition of topology is introduced along with its motivation and importance. The text covers all the topics of topology, including homeomorphism, subspace topology, weak topology, product topology, quotient topology, coproduct topology, order topology, metric topology, and topological properties such as countability axioms, separation axioms, compactness, and connectedness. It also helps to understand the significance of various topological properties in classifying topological spaces.
The P vs. NP problem is one of the fundamental problems of mathematics. It asks whether propositional tautologies can be recognized by a polynomial-time algorithm. The problem would be solved in the negative if one could show that there are propositional tautologies that are very hard to prove, no matter how powerful the proof system you use. This is the foundational problem (the NP vs. coNP problem) of proof complexity, an area linking mathematical logic and computational complexity theory. Written by a leading expert in the field, this book presents a theory for constructing such hard tautologies. It introduces the theory step by step, starting with the historic background and a motivational problem in bounded arithmetic, before taking the reader on a tour of various vistas of the field. Finally, it formulates several research problems to highlight new avenues of research.
Offering a comprehensive introduction to number theory, this is the ideal book both for those who want to learn the subject seriously and independently, or for those already working in number theory who want to deepen their expertise. Readers will be treated to a rich experience, developing the key theoretical ideas while explicitly solving arithmetic problems, with the historical background of analytic and algebraic number theory woven throughout. Topics include methods of solving binomial congruences, a clear account of the quantum factorization of integers, and methods of explicitly representing integers by quadratic forms over integers. In the later parts of the book, the author provides a thorough approach towards composition and genera of quadratic forms, as well as the essentials for detecting bounded gaps between prime numbers that occur infinitely often.
The K-stability of Fano varieties has been a major area of research over the last decade, ever since the Yau-Tian-Donaldson conjecture was resolved. This is the first book to give a comprehensive algebraic treatment of this emerging field. It introduces all the notions of K-stability that have been used over the development of the subject, proves their equivalence, and discusses newly developed theory, including several new proofs for existing theorems. Aiming to be as self-contained as possible, the text begins with a chapter covering essential background knowledge, and includes exercises throughout to test understanding. Written by someone at the forefront of developments in the area, it will be a source of inspiration for graduate students and researchers who work in algebraic geometry.
Oriented matroids appear throughout discrete geometry, with applications in algebra, topology, physics, and data analysis. This introduction to oriented matroids is intended for graduate students, scientists wanting to apply oriented matroids, and researchers in pure mathematics. The presentation is geometrically motivated and largely self-contained, and no knowledge of matroid theory is assumed. Beginning with geometric motivation grounded in linear algebra, the first chapters prove the major cryptomorphisms and the Topological Representation Theorem. From there the book uses basic topology to go directly from geometric intuition to rigorous discussion, avoiding the need for wider background knowledge. Topics include strong and weak maps, localizations and extensions, the Euclidean property and non-Euclidean properties, the Universality Theorem, convex polytopes, and triangulations. Themes that run throughout include the interplay between combinatorics, geometry, and topology, and the idea of oriented matroids as analogs to vector spaces over the real numbers and how this analogy plays out topologically.
Abstract polytopes are partially ordered sets that satisfy some key aspects of the face lattices of convex polytopes. They are chiral if they have maximal symmetry by combinatorial rotations, but none by combinatorial reflections. Aimed at graduate students and researchers in combinatorics, group theory or Euclidean geometry, this text gives a self-contained introduction to abstract polytopes and specialises in chiral abstract polytopes. The first three chapters are introductory and mostly contain basic concepts and results. The fourth chapter talks about ways to obtain chiral abstract polytopes from other abstract polytopes, while the fifth discusses families of chiral polytopes grouped by common properties such as their rank, their small size or their geometric origin. Finally, the last chapter relates chiral polytopes with geometric objects in Euclidean spaces. This material is complemented by a number of examples, exercises and figures, and a list of 75 open problems to inspire further research.
The subject of elliptic curves is one of the jewels of nineteenth-century mathematics, originated by Abel, Gauss, Jacobi, and Legendre. This book, reissued with a new Foreword, presents an introductory account of the subject in the style of the original discoverers, with references to and comments about more modern developments. It combines three of the fundamental themes of mathematics: complex function theory, geometry, and arithmetic. After an informal preparatory chapter, the book follows an historical path, beginning with the work of Abel and Gauss on elliptic integrals and elliptic functions. This is followed by chapters on theta functions, modular groups and modular functions, the quintic, the imaginary quadratic field, and on elliptic curves. Requiring only a first acquaintance with complex function theory, this book is an ideal introduction to the subject for graduate students and researchers in mathematics and physics, with many exercises with hints scattered throughout the text.
This is the first book to revisit the theory of rewriting in the context of strict higher categories, through the unified approach provided by polygraphs, and put it in the context of homotopical algebra. The first half explores the theory of polygraphs in low dimensions and its applications to the computation of the coherence of algebraic structures. Illustrated with algorithmic computations on algebraic structures, the only prerequisite in this section is basic category theory. The theory is introduced step-by-step, with detailed proofs. The second half introduces and studies the general notion of n-polygraph, before addressing the homotopy theory of these polygraphs. It constructs the folk model structure on the category on strict higher categories and exhibits polygraphs as cofibrant objects. This allows the formulation of higher-dimensional generalizations of the coherence results developed in the first half. Graduate students and researchers in mathematics and computer science will find this work invaluable.
This work develops techniques and basic results concerning the homotopy theory of enriched diagrams and enriched Mackey functors. Presentation of a category of interest as a diagram category has become a standard and powerful technique in a range of applications. Diagrams that carry enriched structures provide deeper and more robust applications. With an eye to such applications, this work provides further development of both the categorical algebra of enriched diagrams, and the homotopy theoretic applications in K-theory spectra. The title refers to certain enriched presheaves, known as Mackey functors, whose homotopy theory classifies that of equivariant spectra. More generally, certain stable model categories are classified as modules - in the form of enriched presheaves - over categories of generating objects. This text contains complete definitions, detailed proofs, and all the background material needed to understand the topic. It will be indispensable for graduate students and researchers alike.
Topological spaces in general, and the real numbers in particular, have the characteristic of exhibiting a 'continuity structure', one that can be examined from the vantage point of Baire category or of Lebesgue measure. Though they are in some sense dual, work over the last half-century has shown that it is the former, topological view, that has pride of place since it reveals a much richer structure that draws from, and gives back to, areas such as analytic sets, infinite games, probability, infinite combinatorics, descriptive set theory and topology. Keeping prerequisites to a minimum, the authors provide a new exposition and synthesis of the extensive mathematical theory needed to understand the subject's current state of knowledge, and they complement their presentation with a thorough bibliography of source material and pointers to further work. The result is a book that will be the standard reference for all researchers in the area.
Offering a unique resource for advanced graduate students and researchers, this book treats the fundamentals of Quillen model structures on abelian and exact categories. Building the subject from the ground up using cotorsion pairs, it develops the special properties enjoyed by the homotopy category of such abelian model structures. A central result is that the homotopy category of any abelian model structure is triangulated and characterized by a suitable universal property – it is the triangulated localization with respect to the class of trivial objects. The book also treats derived functors and monoidal model categories from this perspective, showing how to construct tensor triangulated categories from cotorsion pairs. For researchers and graduate students in algebra, topology, representation theory, and category theory, this book offers clear explanations of difficult model category methods that are increasingly being used in contemporary research.
Arising from the 2022 Japan-US Mathematics Institute, this book covers a range of topics in modern algebraic geometry, including birational geometry, classification of varieties in positive and zero characteristic, K-stability, Fano varieties, foliations, the minimal model program and mathematical physics. The volume includes survey articles providing an accessible introduction to current areas of interest for younger researchers. Research papers, written by leading experts in the field, disseminate recent breakthroughs in areas related to the research of V.V. Shokurov, who has been a source of inspiration for birational geometry over the last forty years.
Understanding the natural numbers, which we use to count things, comes naturally. Meanwhile, the real numbers, which include a wide range of numbers from whole numbers to fractions to exotic ones like π, are, frankly, really difficult to describe rigorously. Instead of waiting to take a theorem-proof graduate course to appreciate the real numbers, readers new to university-level mathematics can explore the core ideas behind the construction of the real numbers in this friendly introduction. Beginning with the intuitive notion of counting, the book progresses step-by-step to the real numbers. Each sort of number is defined in terms of a simpler kind by developing an equivalence relation on a previous idea. We find the finite sets' equivalence classes are the natural numbers. Integers are equivalence classes of pairs of natural numbers. Modular numbers are equivalence classes of integers. And so forth. Exercises and their solutions are included.
Every four years leading researchers gather to survey the latest developments in all aspects of group theory. Since 1981, the proceedings of these meetings have provided a regular snapshot of the state of the art in group theory and helped to shape the direction of research in the field. This volume contains selected papers from the 2022 meeting held in Newcastle. It includes substantial survey articles from the invited speakers, namely the mini course presenters Michel Brion, Fanny Kassel and Pham Huu Tiep; and the invited one-hour speakers Bettina Eick, Scott Harper and Simon Smith. It features these alongside contributed survey articles, including some new results, to provide an outstanding resource for graduate students and researchers.
Albert algebras provide key tools for understanding exceptional groups and related structures such as symmetric spaces. This self-contained book provides the first comprehensive reference on Albert algebras over fields without any restrictions on the characteristic of the field. As well as covering results in characteristic 2 and 3, many results are proven for Albert algebras over an arbitrary commutative ring, showing that they hold in this greater generality. The book extensively covers requisite knowledge, such as non-associative algebras over commutative rings, scalar extensions, projective modules, alternative algebras, and composition algebras over commutative rings, with a special focus on octonion algebras. It then goes into Jordan algebras, Lie algebras, and group schemes, providing exercises so readers can apply concepts. This centralized resource illuminates the interplay between results that use only the structure of Albert algebras and those that employ theorems about group schemes, and is ideal for mathematics and physics researchers.
The theory of definable equivalence relations has been a vibrant area of research in descriptive set theory for the past three decades. It serves as a foundation of a theory of complexity of classification problems in mathematics and is further motivated by the study of group actions in a descriptive, topological, or measure-theoretic context. A key part of this theory is concerned with the structure of countable Borel equivalence relations. These are exactly the equivalence relations generated by Borel actions of countable discrete groups and this introduces important connections with group theory, dynamical systems, and operator algebras. This text surveys the state of the art in the theory of countable Borel equivalence relations and delineates its future directions and challenges. It gives beginning graduate students and researchers a bird's-eye view of the subject, with detailed references to the extensive literature provided for further study.
Symmetry is one of the most important concepts in mathematics and physics. Emerging from the 2021 LMS-Bath Summer School, this book provides Ph.D. students and young researchers with some of the essential tools for the advanced study of symmetry. Illustrated with numerous examples, it explores some of the most exciting interactions between Dirac operators, K-theory and representation theory of real reductive groups. The final chapter provides a self-contained account of the representation theory of p-adic groups, from the very basics to an advanced perspective, with many arithmetic aspects.
The Leech lattice Λ, the Conway group ∙O, and the Monster group M are immensely famous structures. They each grow out of the Mathieu group M24 and its underlying combinatorial structure, and play an important role in various branches of mathematics and in theoretical physics. Written by an expert in the field, this book provides a new generation of mathematicians with the intimate knowledge of M24 needed to understand these beautiful objects, and many others. It starts by exploring Steiner systems, before introducing the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) as a device for working with the Steiner system S(5,8,24). Emphasizing how theoretical and computational approaches complement one another, the author describes how familiarity with M24 leads to the concept of 'symmetric generation' of groups. The final chapter brings together the various strands of the book to produce a nested chain of groups culminating in the largest Conway simple group Co1.