This book is ideal for anyone who would like to read about the lives of some of the most remarkable physicists born since the second half of the seventeenth century. Each of the fifty-five physicists profiled have made important contributions to physics, through their ideas and teaching, or in other ways. The biographies are arranged chronologically by the physicists' dates of birth, so that, when read in sequence, they convey how physics developed over time. However, the book emphasizes their varied life stories, not the details of their achievements. Ioan James is Professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of Remarkable Mathematicians (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Topological and Uniform Spaces (Springer-Verlag, 1999).

Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? Why do financially sensible people jump lemming-like into hare-brained speculative frenzies–only to jump broker-like out of windows when their fantasies dissolve? We may think that the Great Crash of 1929, junk bonds of the '80s, and over-valued high-tech stocks of the '90s are peculiarly 20th century aberrations, but Mackay's classic–first published in 1841–shows that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits, and has no temporal bounds. These are extraordinarily illuminating,and, unfortunately, entertaining tales of chicanery, greed and naivete. Essential reading for any student of human nature or the transmission of ideas.

This book provides a review of image analysis techniques as they are applied in the field of diagnostic and therapeutic nuclear medicine. Driven in part by the remarkable increase in computing power and its ready and inexpensive availability, this is a relatively new yet rapidly expanding field. Likewise, although the use of radionuclides for diagnosis and therapy has origins dating back almost to the discovery of natural radioactivity itself, radionuclide therapy and, in particular, targeted radionuclide therapy has only recently emerged as a promising approach for therapy of cancer and, to a lesser extent, other diseases. As effort has, therefore, been made to place the reviews provided in this book in a broader context.

The wavelets transform is a mathematical technique in the field of image compression and digital signal analysis. The author aims at providing the reader with a working understanding of wavelets. In numerous examples, he discusses the potentials and limits of the tool in industrial applications. The book is completed by the author`s own Matlab codes. It is very well suited for electrical engineering students and engineers in industry.

This volume is devoted to cancer and atherosclerosis, two of the most important proliferative pathologies in the world today. This book provides a useful point of reference on the mechanisms that link cholesterol esters to cell proliferation, summarizing the latest advances both in basic science and clinical research.
This book will be of undoubted value to biomedical students and teachers, as well as those actively engaged in research on cholesterol metabolism, cancer, and atherosclerosis.

Unearth the lucrative opportunities of the small business market. The new entrepreneurial explosion has many Fortune 500 companies pinning their hopes for prosperity on the small business sector. But most blue chip behemoths simply don't know how to reach small businesses-they don't understand this segment's diversity and how to effectively reach out to its various parts. Drilling for Gold will show the big companies just how small businesses tick. John Warrillow reveals the enormous size of the small business marketing opportunity and shows readers various ways to reach this vast, yet seemingly hidden sector. He covers how to address the small business market, managing cost control, and segmenting the customer base, along with numerous case studies.

"Proper capacity management is the driving force behind outstanding corporate performance. Essentials of Capacity Management clearly describes its impact on operations, as well as how to use measurement systems and process analysis to enhance capacity usage. This is a solid foundation in capacity management for the business professional!"
–Steve Bragg, Author

IN RECENT YEARS, the need for help in understanding project behaviour has been exacerbated, as projects have become more complex while time-scales have tightened, adding to project complexity. Project teams however, rarely pay sufficient attention to modelling the behaviour of projects and this can lead to inadequate risk analysis, ineffective project control, and uninformed "lessons learned".

This unique reference shows managers how to combine Six Sigma, Lean and TOC with a method called Look Forward to achieve unbeatable, sustained improvement. Look Forward complements each of the other methods in a way that will assure self-perpetuating enterprise improvement is ingrained in the culture of a company.

Equivariant cohomology in the framework of smooth manifolds is the subject of this book which is part of a collection of volumes edited by J. Brning and V. M. Guillemin. The point of departure are two relatively short but very remarkable papers by Henry Cartan, published in 1950 in the Proceedings of the "Colloque de Topologie". These papers are reproduced here, together with a scholarly introduction to the subject from a modern point of view, written by two of the leading experts in the field. This "introduction", however, turns out to be a textbook of its own presenting the first full treatment of equivariant cohomology from the de Rahm theoretic perspective. The well established topological approach is linked with the differential form aspect through the equivariant de Rahm theorem. The systematic use of supersymmetry simplifies considerably the ensuing development of the basic technical tools which are then applied to a variety of subjects (like symplectic geometry, Lie theory, dynamical systems, and mathematical physics), leading up to the localization theorems and recent results on the ring structure of the equivariant cohomology.

The book introduces and develops the basic actuarial models and underlying pricing of life-contingent pension annuities and life insurance from a unique financial perspective. The ideas and techniques are then applied to the real-world problem of generating sustainable retirement income towards the end of the human life-cycle. The role of lifetime income, longevity insurance, and systematic withdrawal plans are investigated in a parsimonious framework. The underlying technology and terminology of the book are based on continuous-time financial economics by merging analytic laws of mortality with the dynamics of equity markets and interest rates. Nonetheless, the book requires a minimal background in mathematics and emphasizes applications and examples more than proofs and theorems. It can serve as an ideal textbook for an applied course on wealth management and retirement planning in addition to being a reference for quantitatively-inclined financial planners.

Aims to address the coordination of quality control with other aspects of a firm's production system and supply chain, specifically, the coordination between the inspection-repair of finished products and their follow-up services.

Phase transitions in which crystalline solids undergo structural changes present an interesting problem in the interplay between the crystal structure and the ordering process. This text, intended for readers with some prior knowledge of condensed-matter physics, emphasizes the basic physics behind such spontaneous structural changes in crystals. Starting with the relevant thermodynamic principles, the book discusses the nature of order variables and their collective motion in a crystal lattice; in a structural phase transition a singularity in such a collective mode is responsible for the lattice instability, as revealed by soft phonons.

This unique reference offers a unified presentation of the theory of binary polynomial transforms and details their numerous applications in nonlinear signal processing.

MATLAB is used in a wide range of applications in geosciences, such as image processing in remote sensing, generation and processing of digital elevation models and the analysis of time series. This book introduces basic methods of data analysis in geosciences using MATLAB. The text includes a brief description of each method and numerous examples demonstrating how MATLAB can be used on data sets from earth sciences. All MATLAB recipes can be easily modified in order to analyse the reader's own data sets. The book comes with a CD containing exemplary data sets and a digital version of the MATLAB recipes.