Hyman Bass - Böcker

The Mathematical Sciences Education Board (MSEB) and the U.S. National Commission on Mathematics Instruction (USNCMI) took advantage of a unique opportunity to bring educators together. In August 2000, following the Ninth International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME-9) in Makuhari, Japan, MSEB and USNCMI capitalized on the presence of mathematics educators in attendance from the United States and Japan by holding a two and a half--day workshop on the professional development of mathematics teachers. This workshop used the expertise of the participants from the two countries to develop a better, more flexible, and more useful understanding of the knowledge that is needed to teach well and how to help teachers to obtain this knowledge. A major focus of the workshop was to discuss teachersa (TM) opportunities in both societies -- using teaching practice as a medium for professional development. Another focus of the workshop addressed practice by considering the records of teaching, including videos of classroom lessons and cases describing teachers and their work.These proceedings reflect the activities and discussion of the workshop using both print and video to enable others to share in their experience

In addition to his seminal work in topology, John Milnor is also an accomplished algebraist, producing a spectacular agenda-setting body of work related to algebraic $K$-theory and quadratic forms during the five year period 1965-1970. These papers, together with other (some of them previously unpublished) works in algebra are assembled here in this fifth volume of Milnor's Collected Papers. They constitute not only an important historical archive, but also, thanks to the clarity and elegance of Milnor's mathematical exposition, a valuable resource for work in the fields treated. In addition, Milnor's papers are complemented by detailed surveys on the current state of the field in two areas. One is on the congruence subgroup problem, by Gopal Prasad and Andrei Rapinchuk. The other is on algebraic $K$-theory and quadratic forms, by Alexander Merkurjev.|In addition to his seminal work in topology, John Milnor is also an accomplished algebraist, producing a spectacular agenda-setting body of work related to algebraic $K$-theory and quadratic forms during the five year period 1965-1970. These papers, together with other (some of them previously unpublished) works in algebra are assembled here in this fifth volume of Milnor's Collected Papers. They constitute not only an important historical archive, but also, thanks to the clarity and elegance of Milnor's mathematical exposition, a valuable resource for work in the fields treated. In addition, Milnor's papers are complemented by detailed surveys on the current state of the field in two areas. One is on the congruence subgroup problem, by Gopal Prasad and Andrei Rapinchuk. The other is on algebraic $K$-theory and quadratic forms, by Alexander Merkurjev.

[UPDATED 6/6/2000] Group actions on trees furnish a unified geometric way of recasting the chapter of combinatorial group theory dealing with free groups, amalgams, and HNN extensions. Some of the principal examples arise from rank one simple Lie groups over a non-archimedean local field acting on their Bruhat--Tits trees. In particular this leads to a powerful method for studying lattices in such Lie groups. This monograph extends this approach to the more general investigation of $X$-lattices $\Gamma$, where $X$ is a locally finite tree and $\Gamma$ is a discrete group of automorphisms of $X$ of finite covolume. These "tree lattices" are the main object of study. Special attention is given to both parallels and contrasts with the case of Lie groups. Beyond the Lie group connection, the theory has applications to combinatorics and number theory. The authors present a coherent survey of the results on uniform tree lattices, and a (previously unpublished) development of the theory of non-uniform tree lattices, including some fundamental and recently proved existence theorems. Non-uniform tree lattices are much more complicated than unifrom ones; thus a good deal of attention is given to the construction and study of diverse examples. Some interesting new phenomena are observed here which cannot occur in the case of Lie groups. The fundamental technique is the encoding of tree actions in terms of the corresponding quotient "graph of groups." {\it Tree Lattices} should be a helpful resource to researchers in the field, and may also be used for a graduate course in geometric group theory.

The Mathematical Neighborhoods of School Mathematics visits regions beyond, but proximal to and accessible from school mathematics. Its aim is to give readers a glimpse of not just the rich diversity and adaptability of mathematics, but, most importantly, its interconnections and overall coherence, a perspective not easily available from the school curriculum. This aim entailed assembling a variety of substantial mathematical domains that do not typically cohabit the same volume. The book begins with an in-depth treatment of topics in the school curriculum, often with novel approaches and connections. A unifying thread is the group theoretic study of addition and multiplication in the various number systems of school mathematics. The exposition is mathematically rigorous, including proofs of many fundamental theorems not otherwise easily available in mathematically accessible form.The Mathematical Neighborhoods of School Mathematics is intended to be a conceptual contribution to mathematics education. It will be a valuable resource in professional development of mathematics teachers, and in mathematical enrichment programs, for both students and teachers. In this regard, many of the chapters are relatively self-contained. It could also serve as a text for undergraduate mathematics majors with an interest in teaching. The exceptional Chapter 11 presents some novel instructional designs for problem-solving activities meant to cultivate ""connection-oriented mathematical thinking.

The theme of this monograph is an interplay between dynamical systems and group theory. The authors formalize and study "cyclic renormalization", a phenomenon which appears naturally for some interval dynamical systems. A possibly infinite hierarchy of such renormalizations is naturally represented by a rooted tree, together with a "spherically transitive" automorphism; the infinite case corresponds to maps with an invariant Cantor set, a class of particular interest for its relevance to the description of the transition to chaos and of the Mandelbrot set. The normal subgroup structure of the automorhpism groups of such "spherically homogenous" rooted trees is investigated in detail. This work should be of interest to researchers in both dynamical systems and group theory.