K L Teo – författare

This monograph is a study of optimal control applied to cancer chemotherapy, the treatment of cancer using drugs that kill cancer cells. The aim is to determine whether current methods for the administration of chemotherapy are optimal, and if alternative regimens should be considered.The research utilizes the mathematical theory of optimal control, an active research area for many mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. It is of multidisciplinary nature, having been applied to areas ranging from engineering to biomedicine. The aim in optimal control is to achieve a given objective at minimum cost. A set of differential equations is used to describe the evolution in time of the process being modelled, and constraints limit the policies that can be used to attain the objective.In this monograph, mathematical models are used to construct optimal drug schedules. These are treatment guidelines specifying which drug to deliver, when, and at what dose. Many current drug schedules have been derived empirically, based upon “rules of thumb”.The monograph has been structured so that most of the high-level mathematics is introduced in a special appendix. In this way, a scientist can skip the more subtle aspects of the theory and still understand the biomedical applications that follow. However, the text is self-contained so that a deeper understanding of the mathematics of optimal control can be gained from the mathematical appendix.The mathematical models in this book and the associated computer simulations show that low intensity chemotherapy is a better choice of treatment than high intensity chemotherapy, under certain conditions.

Although students of analysis are familiar with real and complex numbers, few treatments of analysis deal with the development of such numbers in any depth. An understanding of number systems at a fundamental level is necessary for a deeper grasp of analysis. Beginning with elementary concepts from logic and set theory, this book develops in turn the natural numbers, the integers and the rational, real and complex numbers. The development is motivated by the need to solve polynomial equations, and the book concludes by proving that such equations have solutions in the complex number system.

This is the first book to comprehensively cover chromatic polynomials of graphs. It includes most of the known results and unsolved problems in the area of chromatic polynomials. Dividing the book into three main parts, the authors take readers from the rudiments of chromatic polynomials to more complex topics: the chromatic equivalence classes of graphs and the zeros and inequalities of chromatic polynomials. The early material is well suited to a graduate level course while the latter parts will be an invaluable resource for postgraduate students and researchers in combinatorics and graph theory.