Robert Mahony – författare

Jonathan Swift was internationally acclaimed in his own time for Gulliver's Travels and other brilliant satires in verse and prose. In his native Ireland, however, he was most fervently admired as a patriot. Advocating economic self-sufficiency for Ireland and resistance to the high-handedness of the British government, Swift represented an articulate challenge to British rule. Although his reputation as an Irish patriot declined after his death, the twentieth century has come to recognize him as a founding father of Irish nationalism.This book traces Swift's fluctuating reception in Ireland through the centuries, examining his nationalist ambivalence for a homeland he could defend but not love, and comparing his feelings with the ambiguities that have marked the development of Irish identity more widely. Robert Mahony considers Swift's posthumous reputation in both literary and popular culture and examines his unusual place in Irish political rhetoric. He shows how Swift's reputation suffered in the later eighteenth century through its seeming irrelevance to shifting political circumstances. In the early nineteenth century, Irish Protestants made him a symbol of their own patriotism within the British union, but he was ignored, or dismissed as a bigot, by most Catholic writers. In the 1840s the tide turned as the Young Ireland movement emphasized Swift's anti-British rhetoric while establishing his Protestant pedigree for contemporary Protestants. Although charges of hypocrisy and of an English cultural orientation survived as late as the 1930s, the construction of Swift as a patriot—with human flaws—was ultimately sustained.

Many problems in the sciences and engineering can be rephrased as optimization problems on matrix search spaces endowed with a so-called manifold structure. This book shows how to exploit the special structure of such problems to develop efficient numerical algorithms. It places careful emphasis on both the numerical formulation of the algorithm and its differential geometric abstraction--illustrating how good algorithms draw equally from the insights of differential geometry, optimization, and numerical analysis. Two more theoretical chapters provide readers with the background in differential geometry necessary to algorithmic development. In the other chapters, several well-known optimization methods such as steepest descent and conjugate gradients are generalized to abstract manifolds. The book provides a generic development of each of these methods, building upon the material of the geometric chapters. It then guides readers through the calculations that turn these geometrically formulated methods into concrete numerical algorithms.The state-of-the-art algorithms given as examples are competitive with the best existing algorithms for a selection of eigenspace problems in numerical linear algebra. Optimization Algorithms on Matrix Manifolds offers techniques with broad applications in linear algebra, signal processing, data mining, computer vision, and statistical analysis. It can serve as a graduate-level textbook and will be of interest to applied mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists.