P. R. Halmos – författare

Every mathematician agrees that every mathematician must know some set theory; the disagreement begins in trying to decide how much is some. This book contains my answer to that question. The purpose of the book is to tell the beginning student of advanced mathematics the basic set­ theoretic facts of life, and to do so with the minimum of philosophical discourse and logical formalism. The point of view throughout is that of a prospective mathematician anxious to study groups, or integrals, or manifolds. From this point of view the concepts and methods of this book are merely some of the standard mathematical tools; the expert specialist will find nothing new here. Scholarly bibliographical credits and references are out of place in a purely expository book such as this one. The student who gets interested in set theory for its own sake should know, however, that there is much more to the subject than there is in this book. One of the most beautiful sources of set-theoretic wisdom is still Hausdorff's Set theory. A recent and highly readable addition to the literature, with an extensive and up-to-date bibliography, is Axiomatic set theory by Suppes.

Every mathematician agrees that every mathematician must know some set theory; the disagreement begins in trying to decide how much is some. This book contains my answer to that question. The purpose of the book is to tell the beginning student of advanced mathematics the basic set­ theoretic facts of life, and to do so with the minimum of philosophical discourse and logical formalism. The point of view throughout is that of a prospective mathematician anxious to study groups, or integrals, or manifolds. From this point of view the concepts and methods of this book are merely some of the standard mathematical tools; the expert specialist will find nothing new here. Scholarly bibliographical credits and references are out of place in a purely expository book such as this one. The student who gets interested in set theory for its own sake should know, however, that there is much more to the subject than there is in this book. One of the most beautiful sources of set-theoretic wisdom is still Hausdorff's Set theory. A recent and highly readable addition to the literature, with an extensive and up-to-date bibliography, is Axiomatic set theory by Suppes.

James E. Humphreys is presently Professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Before this, he held the posts of Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oregon and Associate Professor of Mathematics at New York University. His main research interests include group theory and Lie algebras. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1961. He did graduate work in philosophy and mathematics at Cornell University and later received hi Ph.D. from Yale University if 1966. In 1972, Springer-Verlag published his first book, "Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory" (graduate Texts in Mathematics Vol. 9).

This book is an introduction to information and coding theory at the graduate or advanced undergraduate level. It assumes a basic knowledge of probability and modern algebra, but is otherwise self- contained. The intent is to describe as clearly as possible the fundamental issues involved in these subjects, rather than covering all aspects in an encyclopedic fashion. The first quarter of the book is devoted to information theory, including a proof of Shannon's famous Noisy Coding Theorem. The remainder of the book is devoted to coding theory and is independent of the information theory portion of the book. After a brief discussion of general families of codes, the author discusses linear codes (including the Hamming, Golary, the Reed-Muller codes), finite fields, and cyclic codes (including the BCH, Reed-Solomon, Justesen, Goppa, and Quadratic Residue codes). An appendix reviews relevant topics from modern algebra.

This book contains four essays on expository writing of books and papers at the research level and at the level of graduate texts. The authors were the four members of the AMS Committee on Expository Writing.

Every mathematician agrees that every mathematician must know some set theory; the disagreement begins in trying to decide how much is some. This book contains my answer to that question. The purpose of the book is to tell the beginning student of advanced mathematics the basic set­ theoretic facts of life, and to do so with the minimum of philosophical discourse and logical formalism. The point of view throughout is that of a prospective mathematician anxious to study groups, or integrals, or manifolds. From this point of view the concepts and methods of this book are merely some of the standard mathematical tools; the expert specialist will find nothing new here. Scholarly bibliographical credits and references are out of place in a purely expository book such as this one. The student who gets interested in set theory for its own sake should know, however, that there is much more to the subject than there is in this book. One of the most beautiful sources of set-theoretic wisdom is still Hausdorff''s Set theory. A recent and highly readable addition to the literature, with an extensive and up-to-date bibliography, is Axiomatic set theory by Suppes.

The subject. The phrase "integral operator" (like some other mathematically informal phrases, such as "effective procedure" and "geometric construction") is sometimes defined and sometimes not. When it is defined, the definition is likely to vary from author to author. While the definition almost always involves an integral, most of its other features can vary quite considerably. Superimposed limiting operations may enter (such as L2 limits in the theory of Fourier transforms and principal values in the theory of singular integrals), IJ'' spaces and abstract Banach spaces may intervene, a scalar may be added (as in the theory of the so-called integral operators of the second kind), or, more generally, a multiplication operator may be added (as in the theory of the so-called integral operators of the third kind). The definition used in this book is the most special of all. According to it an integral operator is the natural "continuous" generali­ zation of the operators induced by matrices, and the only integrals that appear are the familiar Lebesgue-Stieltjes integrals on classical non-pathological mea­ sure spaces. The category. Some of the flavor of the theory can be perceived in finite­ dimensional linear algebra. Matrices are sometimes considered to be an un­ natural and notationally inelegant way of looking at linear transformations. From the point of view of this book that judgement misses something.