Philippe Blanchard – författare

Physics has long been regarded as a wellspring of mathematical problems. Mathematical Methods in Physics is a self-contained presentation, driven by historic motivations, excellent examples, detailed proofs, and a focus on those parts of mathematics that are needed in more ambitious courses on quantum mechanics and classical and quantum field theory. Aimed primarily at a broad community of graduate students in mathematics, mathematical physics, physics and engineering, as well as researchers in these disciplines.

This book examines career patterns of the professoriate. Professors may appear as specialised individualists in their fields, and yet they follow pathways which are anything but unique. Drawing from a unique data set, the authors analyse the trajectories of the almost 2000 linguists and sociologists who hold full professorships in Germany, France and the UK in 2015.  With a background in social theory, they reveal models, structures and rules that organise the professional lives and biographies of the most senior academics. This book presents the results of a systematic empirical study, which will be of interest to specialists in higher education studies as well as to linguists and sociologists, and to all academics more generally.

This edited book presents the problems of time and direction from an interdisciplinary point of view, concentrating in particular on the following relations:

• Time and physics• Time, philosophy and psychology• Time, mathematics and information theory

It is a unique contribution by philosophers and scientists who are active in mathematics, physics, biology, engineering, information theory and psychology. Questions such as the existence of a Big Bang, the neurobiological basis regarding the coexistence of free will and determinism, intercultural aspects of time, mathematical models of time, psychopathological features of time, and micro reversibility versus macroscopic irreversibility are studied. It also provides a truly interdisciplinary study of the problematic ''arrow of time''.

This book gives a general view of sequence analysis, the statistical study of successions of states or events. It includes innovative contributions on life course studies, transitions into and out of employment, contemporaneous and historical careers, and political trajectories. The approach presented in this book is now central to the life-course perspective and the study of social processes more generally.

This volume promotes the dialogue between approaches to sequence analysis that developed separately, within traditions contrasted in space and disciplines. It includes the latest developments in sequential concepts, coding, atypical datasets and time patterns, optimal matching and alternative algorithms, survey optimization, and visualization.

Field studies include original sequential material related to parenting in 19th-century Belgium, higher education and work in Finland and Italy, family formation before and after German reunification, French Jews persecuted inoccupied France, long-term trends in electoral participation, and regime democratization.

Overall the book reassesses the classical uses of sequences and it promotes new ways of collecting, formatting, representing and processing them. The introduction provides basic sequential concepts and tools, as well as a history of the method. Chapters are presented in a way that is both accessible to the beginner and informative to the expert.

The second edition of this textbook presents the basic mathematical knowledge and skills that are needed for courses on modern theoretical physics, such as those on quantum mechanics, classical and quantum field theory, and related areas.  The authors stress that learning mathematical physics is not a passive process and include numerous detailed proofs, examples, and over 200 exercises, as well as hints linking mathematical concepts and results to the relevant physical concepts and theories.  All of the material from the first edition has been updated, and five new chapters have been added on such topics as distributions, Hilbert space operators, and variational methods.

The text is divided into three parts:

- Part I: A brief introduction to (Schwartz) distribution theory. Elements from the theories of ultra distributions and (Fourier) hyperfunctions are given in addition to some deeper results for Schwartz distributions, thus providing a rather comprehensive introduction to the theory of generalized functions. Basic properties and methods for distributions are developed with applications to constant coefficient ODEs and PDEs.  The relation between distributions and holomorphic functions is considered, as well as basic properties of Sobolev spaces.

- Part II: Fundamental facts about Hilbert spaces. The basic theory of linear (bounded and unbounded) operators in Hilbert spaces and special classes of linear operators - compact, Hilbert-Schmidt, trace class, and Schrödinger operators, as needed in quantum physics and quantum information theory – are explored. This section also contains a detailed spectral analysis of all major classes of linear operators, including completeness of generalized eigenfunctions, as well as of (completely) positive mappings, in particular quantum operations.

- Part III: Direct methods of the calculus of variations and their applications to boundary- and eigenvalue-problems for linear and nonlinear partial differential operators.  The authors conclude with a discussion of the Hohenberg-Kohn variational principle.

The appendices contain proofs of more general and deeper results, including completions, basic facts about metrizable Hausdorff locally convex topological vector spaces, Baire’s fundamental results and their main consequences, and bilinear functionals.

Mathematical Methods in Physics is aimed at a broad community of graduate students in mathematics, mathematical physics, quantum information theory, physics and engineering, as well as researchers in these disciplines.  Expanded content and relevant updates will make this new edition a valuable resource for those working in these disciplines.

Cities can be considered to be among the largest and most complex artificial networks created by human beings. Due to the numerous and diverse human-driven activities, urban network topology and dynamics can differ quite substantially from that of natural networks and so call for an alternative method of analysis.

The intent of the present monograph is to lay down the theoretical foundations for studying the topology of compact urban patterns, using methods from spectral graph theory and statistical physics. These methods are demonstrated as tools to investigate the structure of a number of real cities with widely differing properties: medieval German cities, the webs of city canals in Amsterdam and Venice, and a modern urban structure such as found in Manhattan.

Last but not least, the book concludes by providing a brief overview of possible applications that will eventually lead to a useful body of knowledge for architects, urban planners and civil engineers.