Christopher V. Jones – författare

This work examines research and practice in using visualization to represent optimization models, explore optimum solutions, and summarize the results of the optimization effort. As research in optimization develops more powerful algorithms capable of analyzing ever more complicated problems, an increasing number of books have been written to explain how to construct optimization models and how to build algorithms to analyze these models. However, solving problems using optimization techniques involves more than just developing newer, faster algorithms. Building, debugging, validating and understanding models and algorithms requires appropriate representations. This book describes how scientific visualization can enhance the representations needed for optimization. Relevant techniques of computer graphics, virtual reality, sonification, among others, are examined and specifically targeted to optimization. Moreover, applications of optimization to visualization are also explored.

This book arose out of an invited feature article on visualization and opti­ mization that appeared in the ORSA Journal on Computing in 1994. That article briefly surveyed the current state of the art in visualization as it ap­ plied to optimization. In writing the feature article, it became clear that there was much more to say. Apparently others agreed, and thus this book was born. The book is targeted primarily towards the optimization community rather than the visualization community. Although both optimization and visualization both seek to help people understand complex problems, prac­ titioners in one field are generally unaware of work in the other field. Given the common goals of the respective fields, it seemed fruitful to consider how each can contribute to the other. One might argue that this book should not be focused specifically on optimization but on decision making in general. Perhaps, but it seems that there is sufficient material to create a book targeted specifically to optimization. Certainly many of the ideas presented in the book are appli­ cable to other areas, including computer simulation, decision theory and stochastic modeling. Another book could discuss the use of visualization in these areas.

The foremost way in which the Buddha lives both in Buddhist tradition and in the popular imagination is as a literary character. Whatever we know about him is an amalgamation of his various life-stories and portrayals across a vast range of texts, old and new. This volume acknowledges the plurality of ways in which authors have characterized the Buddha down the centuries and across cultures, beginning with ancient India, through wider Asian contexts, and then globally into modernity. Contributions to the volume offer case studies of different literary recreations of the Buddha that both preserve and create, drawing upon prior heritage yet constantly reimagining the figure of Śākyamuni – understood to be a ‘teacher of gods and men’ – for new audiences and settings.The volume’s chapters examine the Buddha as a figure who lives and changes through literary accounts of his character, life and deeds. From ancient Magadha to modern Mexico, these studies draw out of Buddhist stories what we can learn about the different yet overlapping interests and concerns – political, philosophical, social and otherwise – of authors who brought to life the individual who has been the centre of Buddhist thought and practice for two and half millennia.