Serge Lang – författare

This is a text in basic mathematics with multiple uses for either high school or college level courses. Readers will get a firm foundation in basic principles of mathematics which are necessary to know in order to go ahead in calculus, linear algebra or other topics. The subject matter is clearly covered and the author develops concepts so the reader can see how one subject matter can relate and grow into another.

This book gives an introduction to the basic concepts which are used in differential topology, differential geometry, and differential equations. A certain number of concepts are essential for all three of these areas, and are so basic and elementary, that it is worthwhile to collect them together so that more advanced expositions can be given without having to start from the very beginning. The concepts are concerned with the general basic theory of differential manifolds. As a result, this book can be viewed as a prerequisite to Fundamentals of Differential Geometry. Since this book is intended as a text to follow advanced calculus, manifolds are assumed finite dimensional. In the new edition of this book, the author has made numerous corrections to the text and he has added a chapter on applications of Stokes'' Theorem.

This book, together with Linear Algebra, constitutes a curriculum for an algebra program addressed to undergraduates. The separation of the hnear algebra from the other basic algebraic structures fits all existing tendencies affecting undergraduate teaching, and I agree with these tendencies. I have made the present book self contained logically, but it is probably better if students take the linear algebra course before being introduced to the more abstract notions of groups, rings, and fields, and the systematic development of their basic abstract properties. There is of course a little overlap with the book Lin­ ear Algebra, since I wanted to make the present book self contained. I define vector spaces, matrices, and linear maps and prove their basic properties. The present book could be used for a one-term course, or a year's course, possibly combining it with Linear Algebra. I think it is important to do the field theory and the Galois theory, more important, say, than to do much more group theory than we have done here. There is a chapter on finite fields, which exhibit both features from general field theory, and special features due to characteristic p. Such fields have become important in coding theory.

This book, together with Linear Algebra, constitutes a curriculum for an algebra program addressed to undergraduates. The separation of the hnear algebra from the other basic algebraic structures fits all existing tendencies affecting undergraduate teaching, and I agree with these tendencies. I have made the present book self contained logically, but it is probably better if students take the linear algebra course before being introduced to the more abstract notions of groups, rings, and fields, and the systematic development of their basic abstract properties. There is of course a little overlap with the book Lin­ ear Algebra, since I wanted to make the present book self contained. I define vector spaces, matrices, and linear maps and prove their basic properties. The present book could be used for a one-term course, or a year''s course, possibly combining it with Linear Algebra. I think it is important to do the field theory and the Galois theory, more important, say, than to do much more group theory than we have done here. There is a chapter on finite fields, which exhibit both features from general field theory, and special features due to characteristic p. Such fields have become important in coding theory.

The purpose of this text is to provide a complete, self-contained development of the trace formula and theta inversion formula for SL(2,Z[i])\SL(2,C). Unlike other treatments of the theory, the approach taken here is to begin with the heat kernel on SL(2,C) associated to the invariant Laplacian, which is derived using spherical inversion. The heat kernel on the quotient space SL(2,Z[i])\SL(2,C) is gotten through periodization, and further expanded in an eigenfunction expansion. A theta inversion formula is obtained by studying the trace of the heat kernel. Following the author's previous work, the inversion formula then leads to zeta functions through the Gauss transform.

The purpose of this text is to provide a complete, self-contained development of the trace formula and theta inversion formula for SL(2,Z[i])\SL(2,C). Unlike other treatments of the theory, the approach taken here is to begin with the heat kernel on SL(2,C) associated to the invariant Laplacian, which is derived using spherical inversion. The heat kernel on the quotient space SL(2,Z[i])\SL(2,C) is gotten through periodization, and further expanded in an eigenfunction expansion. A theta inversion formula is obtained by studying the trace of the heat kernel. Following the author's previous work, the inversion formula then leads to zeta functions through the Gauss transform.

The File is a collection of documents from a major disputeinvolving a number of American college professors, mainlymathematicians, statisticians,and sociologists. Thecontroversy was ignited by the mathematician Serge Lang'sreaction to a questionnaire, "The 1977 Survey of theAmerican Professoriate", distributed by E. C. Ladd of theUniversity of Connecticut and S. M. Lipset of Stanford. Theensuing discussion - in part acrimonious and personal - sooninvolved a large group of active and passive participants,and included issues such as survey techniques, evaluation ofacademic work, public and political honesty, and McCarthyismat Harvard.

Introduction to Algebraic and Abelian Functions is a self-contained presentation of a fundamental subject in algebraic geometry and number theory. For this revised edition, the material on theta functions has been expanded, and the example of the Fermat curves is carried throughout the text. This volume is geared toward a second-year graduate course, but it leads naturally to the study of more advanced books listed in the bibliography.

This book is meant as a text for a first year graduate course in analysis. Any standard course in undergraduate analysis will constitute sufficient preparation for its understanding, for instance, my Undergraduate Anal­ ysis. I assume that the reader is acquainted with notions of uniform con­ vergence and the like. In this third edition, I have reorganized the book by covering inte­ gration before functional analysis. Such a rearrangement fits the way courses are taught in all the places I know of. I have added a number of examples and exercises, as well as some material about integration on the real line (e.g. on Dirac sequence approximation and on Fourier analysis), and some material on functional analysis (e.g. the theory of the Gelfand transform in Chapter XVI). These upgrade previous exercises to sections in the text. In a sense, the subject matter covers the same topics as elementary calculus, viz. linear algebra, differentiation and integration. This time, however, these subjects are treated in a manner suitable for the training of professionals, i.e. people who will use the tools in further investiga­ tions, be it in mathematics, or physics, or what have you. In the first part, we begin with point set topology, essential for all analysis, and we cover the most important results.

The present book gives an exposition of the classical basic algebraic and analytic number theory and supersedes my Algebraic Numbers, including much more material, e. g. the class field theory on which 1 make further comments at the appropriate place later. For different points of view, the reader is encouraged to read the collec­ tion of papers from the Brighton Symposium (edited by Cassels-Frohlich), the Artin-Tate notes on class field theory, Weil's book on Basic Number Theory, Borevich-Shafarevich's Number Theory, and also older books like those of W eber, Hasse, Hecke, and Hilbert's Zahlbericht. It seems that over the years, everything that has been done has proved useful, theo­ retically or as examples, for the further development of the theory. Old, and seemingly isolated special cases have continuously acquired renewed significance, often after half a century or more. The point of view taken here is principally global, and we deal with local fields only incidentally. For a more complete treatment of these, cf. Serre's book Corps Locaux. There is much to be said for a direct global approach to number fields. Stylistically, 1 have intermingled the ideal and idelic approaches without prejudice for either. 1 also include two proofs of the functional equation for the zeta function, to acquaint the reader with different techniques (in some sense equivalent, but in another sense, suggestive of very different moods).

This is the third version of a book on differential manifolds. The first version appeared in 1962, and was written at the very beginning of a period of great expansion of the subject. At the time, I found no satisfactory book for the foundations of the subject, for multiple reasons. I expanded the book in 1971, and I expand it still further today. Specifically, I have added three chapters on Riemannian and pseudo Riemannian geometry, that is, covariant derivatives, curvature, and some applications up to the Hopf-Rinow and Hadamard-Cartan theorems, as well as some calculus of variations and applications to volume forms. I have rewritten the sections on sprays, and I have given more examples of the use of Stokes' theorem. I have also given many more references to the literature, all of this to broaden the perspective of the book, which I hope can be used among things for a general course leading into many directions. The present book still meets the old needs, but fulfills new ones. At the most basic level, the book gives an introduction to the basic concepts which are used in differential topology, differential geometry, and differential equations. In differential topology, one studies for instance homotopy classes of maps and the possibility of finding suitable differentiable maps in them (immersions, embeddings, isomorphisms, etc.).

The aim of this book is to illustrate by significant special examples three aspects of the theory of Diophantine approximations: the formal relationships that exist between counting processes and the functions entering the theory; the determination of these functions for numbers given as classical numbers; and certain asymptotic estimates holding almost everywhere.Each chapter works out a special case of a much broader general theory, as yet unknown. Indications for this are given throughout the book, together with reference to current publications. The book may be used in a course in number theory, whose students will thus be put in contact with interesting but accessible problems on the ground floor of mathematics.

This is a logically self-contained introduction to analysis, suitable for students who have had two years of calculus. The book centers around those properties that have to do with uniform convergence and uniform limits in the context of differentiation and integration. Topics discussed include the classical test for convergence of series, Fourier series, polynomial approximation, the Poisson kernel, the construction of harmonic functions on the disc, ordinary differential equation, curve integrals, derivatives in vector spaces, multiple integrals, and others. In this second edition, the author has added a new chapter on locally integrable vector fields, has rewritten many sections and expanded others. There are new sections on heat kernels in the context of Dirac families and on the completion of normed vector spaces. A proof of the fundamental lemma of Lebesgue integration is included, in addition to many interesting exercises.

I am very thankful to Springer-Verlag for publishing a collection of some of my non-mathematical works-I call them political works. in the broad sense of the word political. Three of these have appeared in print: - My article on the Ladd-Lipset sUIvey. which appeared in the New York Review of Books. 18 May 1978; and also in The File (Springer-Verlag. 1981). - My article on the Baltimore case. which appeared in the Jour­ nal of Ethics and Behavior. February 1993. - My articles on HIV and AIDS. which appeared in the Yale Sci­ entific (Fall 1994 and Winter 1995). reprinted updated in the book AIDS: Virus-or drug induced? Kluwer Academic Pub­ lishers. 1996. pp. 271-307. The first item. "Academia. Journalism. and Politics." is itself a book based on my Huntington file. The "Background and Motiva­ tion" section of this sub-book can be used as a foreword for all my "political" works. and also contains an explanation of how I use the word "political." In that section. readers will find a general discussion of the way I process information and some criteria I use in discourse.

Harish-Chandra's general Plancherel inversion theorem admits a much shorter presentation for spherical functions. The authors have taken into account contributions by Helgason, Gangolli, Rosenberg, and Anker from the mid-1960s to 1990. Anker's simplification of spherical inversion on the Harish-Chandra Schwartz space had not yet made it into a book exposition. Previous expositions have dealt with a general, wide class of Lie groups. This has made access to the subject difficult for outsiders, who may wish to connect some aspects with several if not all other parts of mathematics, and do so in specific cases of intrinsic interest. The essential features of Harish-Chandra theory are exhibited on SLn(R), but hundreds of pages of background can be replaced by short direct verifications. The material becomes accessible to graduate students with especially no background in Lie groups and representation theory. Spherical inversion is sufficient to deal with the heat kernel, which is at the center of the authors' current research. The book will serve as a self-contained background for parts of this research.

Praise for the first edition:"..Lang's present book is a source of interesting ideas and brilliant techniques." Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum"..It is an admirable straightforward introduction to calculus." MathematikaThis is a reprint of A First Course in Calculus, which has gone through five editions since the early sixties. It covers all the topics traditionally taught in the first-year calculus sequence in a brief and elementary fashion. As sociological and educational conditions have evolved in various ways over the past four decades, it has been found worthwhile to make the original edition available again. The audience consists of those taking the first calculus course, in high school or college. The approach is the one which was successful decades ago, involving clarity, and adjusted to a time when the students' background was not as substantial as it might be. We are now back to those times, so its time to start over again.There are no epsilons-delta, but this does not imply that the book is not rigorous. Lang learned this attitude from Emil Artin, around 1950.

From April 1999 Notices of the AMS, announcing that the author was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition for his many mathematics books: "Lang's Algebra changed the way graduate algebra is taught, retaining classical topics but introducing language and ways of thinking from category theory and homological algebra. It has affected all subsequent graduate-level algebra books."From MathSciNet's review of the first edition:"The author has an impressive knack for presenting the important and interesting ideas of algebra in just the "right" way, and he never gets bogged down in the dry formalism which pervades some parts of algebra."This book is intended as a basic text for a one-year course in Algebra at the graduate level, or as a useful reference for mathematicians and professionals who use higher-level algebra. This book successfully addresses all of the basic concepts of algebra. For the new edition, the author has added exercises and made numerous corrections to the text.

This book gives an introduction to the basic concepts which are used in differential topology, differential geometry, and differential equations. A certain number of concepts are essential for all three of these areas, and are so basic and elementary, that it is worthwhile to collect them together so that more advanced expositions can be given without having to start from the very beginning. The concepts are concerned with the general basic theory of differential manifolds. As a result, this book can be viewed as a prerequisite to Fundamentals of Differential Geometry. Since this book is intended as a text to follow advanced calculus, manifolds are assumed finite dimensional. In the new edition of this book, the author has made numerous corrections to the text and he has added a chapter on applications of Stokes' Theorem.

The present volume supersedes my Introduction to Differentiable Manifolds written a few years back. I have expanded the book considerably, including things like the Lie derivative, and especially the basic integration theory of differential forms, with Stokes' theorem and its various special formulations in different contexts. The foreword which I wrote in the earlier book is still quite valid and needs only slight extension here. Between advanced calculus and the three great differential theories (differential topology, differential geometry, ordinary differential equations), there lies a no-man's-land for which there exists no systematic exposition in the literature. It is the purpose of this book to fill the gap. The three differential theories are by no means independent of each other, but proceed according to their own flavor. In differential topology, one studies for instance homotopy classes of maps and the possibility of finding suitable differentiable maps in them (immersions, embeddings, isomorphisms, etc.). One may also use differentiable structures on topological manifolds to determine the topological structure of the manifold (e.g. it la Smale [26]).

If someone told you that mathematics is quite beautiful, you might be surprised. But you should know that some people do mathematics all their lives, and create mathematics, just as a composer creates music. Usually, every time a mathematician solves a problem, this gives rise to many oth­ ers, new and just as beautiful as the one which was solved. Of course, often these problems are quite difficult, and as in other disciplines can be understood only by those who have studied the subject with some depth, and know the subject well. In 1981, Jean Brette, who is responsible for the Mathematics Section of the Palais de la Decouverte (Science Museum) in Paris, invited me to give a conference at the Palais. I had never given such a conference before, to a non-mathematical public. Here was a challenge: could I communicate to such a Saturday afternoon audience what it means to do mathematics, and why one does mathematics? By "mathematics" I mean pure mathematics. This doesn't mean that pure math is better than other types of math, but I and a number of others do pure mathematics, and it's about them that I am now concerned. Math has a bad reputation, stemming from the most elementary levels. The word is in fact used in many different contexts. First, I had to explain briefly these possible contexts, and the one with which I wanted to deal.

The purpose of a first course in calculus is to teach the student the basic notions of derivative and integral, and the basic techniques and applica­ tions which accompany them. The very talented students, with an ob­ vious aptitude for mathematics, will rapidly require a course in functions of one real variable, more or less as it is understood by professional is not primarily addressed to them (although mathematicians. This book I hope they will be able to acquire from it a good introduction at an early age). I have not written this course in the style I would use for an advanced monograph, on sophisticated topics. One writes an advanced monograph for oneself, because one wants to give permanent form to one's vision of some beautiful part of mathematics, not otherwise ac­ cessible, somewhat in the manner of a composer setting down his sym­ phony in musical notation. This book is written for the students to give them an immediate, and pleasant, access to the subject. I hope that I have struck a proper com­ promise, between dwelling too much on special details and not giving enough technical exercises, necessary to acquire the desired familiarity with the subject. In any case, certain routine habits of sophisticated mathematicians are unsuitable for a first course. Rigor. This does not mean that so-called rigor has to be abandoned.

This book is a short text in linear algebra, intended for a one-term course. Lang discusses the relation between the geometry and the algebra underlying the subject, and includes sections on linear equations, matrices and Gaussian elimination, and vector spaces, linear maps, scalar products, determinants, and eigenvalues. The book contains a large number of exercises, some of the routine computational type, and others are conceptual.

The present course on calculus of several variables is meant as a text, either for one semester following A First Course in Calculus, or for a year if the calculus sequence is so structured. For a one-semester course, no matter what, one should cover the first four chapters, up to the law of conservation of energy, which provides a beautiful application of the chain rule in a physical context, and ties up the mathematics of this course with standard material from courses on physics. Then there are roughly two possibilities: One is to cover Chapters V and VI on maxima and minima, quadratic forms, critical points, and Taylor's formula. One can then finish with Chapter IX on double integration to round off the one-term course. The other is to go into curve integrals, double integration, and Green's theorem, that is Chapters VII, VIII, IX, and X, §1. This forms a coherent whole.

Linear Algebra is intended for a one-term course at the junior or senior level. It begins with an exposition of the basic theory of vector spaces and proceeds to explain the fundamental structure theorems for linear maps, including eigenvectors and eigenvalues, quadric and hermitian forms, diagonalization of symmetric, hermitian, and unitary linear maps and matrices, triangulation, and Jordan canonical form. The book also includes a useful chapter on convex sets and the finite-dimensional Krein-Milman theorem. The presentation is aimed at the student who has already had some exposure to the elementary theory of matrices, determinants, and linear maps. However, the book is logically self-contained. In this new edition, many parts of the book have been rewritten and reorganized, and new exercises have been added.

Since the appearance of Kobayashi's book, there have been several re­ sults at the basic level of hyperbolic spaces, for instance Brody's theorem, and results of Green, Kiernan, Kobayashi, Noguchi, etc. which make it worthwhile to have a systematic exposition. Although of necessity I re­ produce some theorems from Kobayashi, I take a different direction, with different applications in mind, so the present book does not super­ sede Kobayashi's. My interest in these matters stems from their relations with diophan­ tine geometry. Indeed, if X is a projective variety over the complex numbers, then I conjecture that X is hyperbolic if and only if X has only a finite number of rational points in every finitely generated field over the rational numbers. There are also a number of subsidiary conjectures related to this one. These conjectures are qualitative. Vojta has made quantitative conjectures by relating the Second Main Theorem of Nevan­ linna theory to the theory of heights, and he has conjectured bounds on heights stemming from inequalities having to do with diophantine approximations and implying both classical and modern conjectures. Noguchi has looked at the function field case and made substantial progress, after the line started by Grauert and Grauert-Reckziegel and continued by a recent paper of Riebesehl. The book is divided into three main parts: the basic complex analytic theory, differential geometric aspects, and Nevanlinna theory. Several chapters of this book are logically independent of each other.

Elliptic functions parametrize elliptic curves, and the intermingling of the analytic and algebraic-arithmetic theory has been at the center of mathematics since the early part of the nineteenth century. The book is divided into four parts. In the first, Lang presents the general analytic theory starting from scratch. Most of this can be read by a student with a basic knowledge of complex analysis. The next part treats complex multiplication, including a discussion of Deuring's theory of l-adic and p-adic representations, and elliptic curves with singular invariants. Part three covers curves with non-integral invariants, and applies the Tate parametrization to give Serre's results on division points. The last part covers theta functions and the Kronecker Limit Formula. Also included is an appendix by Tate on algebraic formulas in arbitrary charactistic.

From the reviews: "A prominent research mathematician and a high school teacher have combined their efforts in order to produce a high school geometry course. The result is a challenging, vividly written volume which offers a broader treatment than the traditional Euclidean one, but which preserves its pedagogical virtues. The material included has been judiciously selected: some traditional items have been omitted, while emphasis has been laid on topics which relate the geometry course to the mathematics that precedes and follows. The exposition is clear and precise, while avoiding pedantry. There are many exercises, quite a number of them not routine. The exposition falls into twelve chapters: 1. Distance and Angles.- 2. Coordinates.- 3. Area and the Pythagoras Theorem.- 4. The Distance Formula.- 5. Some Applications of Right Triangles.- 6. Polygons.- 7. Congruent Triangles.- 8. Dilatations and Similarities.- 9. Volumes.- 10. Vectors and Dot Product.- 11. Transformations.- 12. Isometries.This excellent text, presenting elementary geometry in a manner fully corresponding to the requirements of modern mathematics, will certainly obtain well-merited popularity. Publicationes Mathematicae Debrecen#1