Roger Webster - Böcker

Convexity provides a wide-ranging introduction for final year undergraduates and graduate students. Convex sets and functions are studied in the Euclidean space IRn, thus allowing an exposition demanding only an elementary knowledge of analysis and linear algebra, and enabling concepts to be motivated through simple geometric examples.The fundemental ideas of convexity are natural and appealing, and does not have to travel far along its path, before meeting significant, aesthetically pleasing results. It develops geometric intuition, and is a showcase for displaying interconnections amongst different parts of mathematics, in addition to have ties with economics, science and engineering. Despite being an active research field, it abounds in unsolved problems having an instant intuitive appeal.One distinctive feature of the book is the diverse applications that it highlights: number theory, geometric extremum problems, combinatorial geometry, linear programming, game theory, polytopes, bodies of constant width, the gamma function, minimax approximation, and linear, classical and matrix inequalities. Several topics make their first appearance in a general introduction to convexity, while a few have not appeared outside research journals. The account has a self-contained treatment of volume, thus permitting a rigorous discussion of mixed volumes, is operimetry and Brunn-Minkowski theory. Full solutions to most of the 241 exercises are provided and detailed suggestions for further reading are given.

Like its previous edition, this book provides an accessible introductory guide to some of the most important aspects of literary theory, linking them to more traditional terms and approaches. In doing so, it offers a fuller introduction to a wider range of literary theories, including post-structuralism, post-modernism, New Historicism, post-colonial theory, and theories of sexual identity. Additional theories are revised and extended in this edition with additional illustrative material.

During the last few decades suburbia has grown enormously and become a phenomenon attracting the attention of scholars as well as practitioners by whom it is seen as an increasingly significant and complex area of modern life. The essays in this volume consider a range of representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present day, including fiction, film, and popular music, drawn from America and Australia as well as Britain. They explore and challenge traditional views of suburbia so that, rather than a location of conformity and stereotypicality, it can be viewed as a site of social conflict, division, and ambiguity as well as a source of significant creativity across a range of cultural texts. The volume takes a thematic approach, considering the rise of suburbia, imagined and real suburbias, alternative suburbias: all of the essays have a strong historical dimension and the overall approach is characterized by interdisciplinarity.