Ball,sphere, and all,all, all

The relationship of multidimensional geometry with statistical thermodynamics and with laws of large numbers is described.     

Kepler, Kugeln, Cluster, Katastrophen

Zusammenfassung. Dieser Überblick skizziert Theorie und Anwendungen von Kugelpackungen, ausgehend von den klassischen Problemen von Kepler und Newton. Der weitaus wichtigste Bereich der regelmäßigen, gitterförmigen Kugelpackungen einschließlich der Anwendungen auf Codes wird kurz gehalten, weil es dazu ausgiebig Literatur gibt. Dagegen wird ausführlicher auf die in den letzten Jahren stark entwickelten endlichen Kugelpackungen eingegangen, die gute Modelle für die in der Nanotechnik wichtigen Microcluster sind. In jeder der relativ knapp gehaltenen Sektionen wird das zum Verständnis Unerlässliche an Theorie angegeben, sowie mindestens ein überraschendes oder im Wortsinn merkwürdiges Phänomen. Außerdem wird auf weiterführende Literatur verwiesen. Für Einsteiger sei insbesondere M. Leppmeiers Buch [L] empfohlen.     

When is an L(B, m, n, r, s, t, z, w) loop SRAR?

In [5, 6], the second author and D. A. ROBINSON initiated a study of non-Moufang Bol loops with the property that over a field, necessarily of characteristic 2, their loop rings satisfy the right, but not the left, Bol identity. They called such loops SRAR and showed that the family of SRAR loops includes those Bol loops which have a unique non-identity commutator/associator. In [4, 2], the current authors presented a construction for a new class of Bol loops denoted L(B,m,n,r,s,t,z,w) with initial data a given (possibly associative) Bol loop B, elements, r, s, t, z and w in the centre of B, and integers m and n.     

Woodhouse, babbage, peacock, and modern Algebra

In a recent article, J. M. Dubbey [Historia Mathematica 4 (1977), 295–302] showed that George Peacock's A Treatise on Algebra (1830) was similar to an unpublished work written by Charles Babbage in 1821. Evidently perplexed about the absence of a dispute over priority, Dubbey concluded that Peacock had unconsciously assimilated Babbage's ideas, and that Babbage was too busy with other activities to be concerned. The thesis of this article is that the innovative aspects of the work of both Babbage and Peacock are extensions of ideas put forth in 1803 by Robert Woodhouse, and that probably neither Babbage nor Peacock was overly concerned with acknowledgments because their approach to algebra was not unique at Cambridge.     

A three-stage, VSVO, Hermite-Birkhoff-Taylor, ODE solver

The new variable-step, variable-order, ODE solver, HBT(p) of order p, presented in this paper, combines a three-stage Runge-Kutta method of order 3 with a Taylor series method of order p-2 to solve initial value problems , where y:R→R^d and f:R×R^d→R^d. The order conditions satisfied by HBT(p) are formulated and they lead to Vandermonde-type linear algebraic systems whose solutions are the coefficients in the formulae for HBT(p). A detailed formulation of variable-step HBT(p) in both fixed-order and variable-order modes is presented. The new method and the Taylor series method have similar regions of absolute stability. To obtain high-accuracy results at high order, this method has been implemented in multiple precision.     

Benchmarking curriculum-based course timetabling: formulations,data formats,instances, validation,visualization, and results

We propose a set of formulations for the Curriculum-Based Course Timetabling problem, with the aim of “capturing” many real-world formulations, and thus encouraging researchers to “reduce” their specific problems to one of them, gaining the opportunity to compare and assess their results. This work is accompanied by a web application that maintains all the necessary infrastructures for benchmarking: validators, data formats, instances, reference scores, lower bounds, solutions, and visualizers. All instances proposed here are based on real data from various universities and they represent a variety of possible situations.