Manuel Molina – författare

The history of the Irisaĝrig and Malgûm region of central Babylonia had been neglected by near eastern studies for decades. This changed with the looting and dissemination of thousands of cuneiform tablets found by illegal excavators in the city of Irisaĝrig, whose location remains unknown. The documents appeared on the antiquities market in the early 2000s or were confiscated by the Iraqi authorities and entered the collections of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and the Sulaymaniyah Museum. Since then, archaeological fieldwork in the area has intensified, leading to the identification of Tulūl al-Fāj and Tulūl al-Baqarāt with the cities of Malgûm and Keš respectively. This book brings together for the first time the research of archaeologists and philologists on this region of ancient Mesopotamia. It presents the results of their ongoing archaeological research, together with studies of the geography, history and economy of the region, and devotes a section to the work of Iraqi scholars in cataloguing and editing the cuneiform material held in national museums, in the belief that all this will contribute to the advancement of knowledge, the promotion of international academic cooperation and the preservation of Iraq's heritage.

This volume collects the proceedings of a three-day conference held in Madrid in July 2010, and it highlights the vitality of the study of late-third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia. Workshops devoted to the Ur III period have been a feature of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale roughly every other year, beginning in London in 2003. In 2009, Steve Garfinkle and Manuel Molina asked the community of Neo-Sumerian scholars to convene the following year in Madrid before the Rencontre in Barcelona. The meeting had more than 50 participants and included 8 topical sessions and 27 papers. The 21 contributions included in this volume cover a broad range of topics: new texts, new interpretations, and new understandings of the language, culture, and history of the Ur III period (2112–2004 B.C.).The present and future of Neo-Sumerian studies are important not only for the field of Assyriology but also for wider inquiries into the ancient world. The extant archives offer insight into some of the earliest cities and one of the earliest kingdoms in the historical record. The era of the Third Dynasty of Ur is also probably the best-attested century in antiquity. This imposes a responsibility on the small community of scholars who work on the Neo-Sumerian materials to make this it accessible to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in the humanities and related fields. This volume is a solid step in this direction.

This volume comprises a selection of papers originally presented at the 6th International Workshop on Branching Processes and Their Applications (IWBPA24), held from April 8 to 12, 2024, in Badajoz, Spain. The contributions cover a broad spectrum of both theoretical and applied topics within the field of branching process theory. Together, they highlight the ongoing vitality and significance of this research area—not only in advancing core mathematical theory but also in tackling emerging challenges across diverse applied fields such as Epidemiology, Biology, Genetics, and Population Dynamics.The topics explored in this volume can be broadly categorized into the following areas:1.      Markovian and non-Markovian branching trees2.      Branching processes in Biology, Genetics, and Epidemiology3.      Multitype and infinite-type branching processes4.      Branching random walks5.      Special branching models6.      Statistical inference in branching processesServing as a valuable resource for current research, this volume also identifies numerous open problems, paving the way for future developments in both theoretical and applied contexts.

This volume gathers papers originally presented at the 3rd Workshop on Branching Processes and their Applications (WBPA15), which was held from 7 to 10 April 2015 in Badajoz, Spain (http://branching.unex.es/wbpa15/index.htm). The papers address a broad range of theoretical and practical aspects of branching process theory. Further, they amply demonstrate that the theoretical research in this area remains vital and topical, as well as the relevance of branching concepts in the development of theoretical approaches to solving new problems in applied fields such as Epidemiology, Biology, Genetics, and, of course, Population Dynamics.The topics covered can broadly be classified into the following areas:1. Coalescent Branching Processes2. Branching Random Walks3. Population Growth Models in Varying and Random Environments4. Size/Density/Resource-Dependent Branching Models5. Age-Dependent Branching Models6. Special Branching Models7. Applications in Epidemiology8. Applications in Biology and GeneticsOffering a valuable reference guide to contemporary branching process theory, the book also explores many open problems, paving the way for future research.

One of the charms of mathematics is the contrast between its generality and its applicability to concrete, even everyday, problems. Branching processes are typical in this. Their niche of mathematics is the abstract pattern of reproduction, sets of individuals changing size and composition through their members reproducing; in other words, what Plato might have called the pure idea behind demography, population biology, cell kinetics, molecular replication, or nuclear ?ssion, had he known these scienti?c ?elds. Even in the performance of algorithms for sorting and classi?cation there is an inkling of the same pattern. In special cases, general properties of the abstract ideal then interact with the physical or biological or whatever properties at hand. But the population, or bran- ing, pattern is strong; it tends to dominate, and here lies the reason for the extreme usefulness of branching processes in diverse applications. Branching is a clean and beautiful mathematical pattern, with an intellectually challenging intrinsic structure, and it pervades the phenomena it underlies.