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[Historia Mathematica 4 (1977), 295–302] showed that George Peacock's A Treatise on Algebra (1830) was similar to an unpublished work written by Charles Babbage in 1821.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.     

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.     

基于区间数据分析的期刊发展现状分析

采用CSSCI数据库中收录的全部期刊数据,通过相关分析、区间数据主成分分析等方法建立模型,客观地对整个数据库中期刊的整体特征进行全面、系统的分析,探寻其中的特征、规律以及原因,提出了办好学术期刊的一些方式方法.     

Factorizations,denseness, separation,and relatively compact objects

Some of the relationships among the topological notions: ‘Hausdorff’, ‘compact’, ‘perfect’, and ‘closed’ are abstracted to a more general categorical setting, where they are shown to remain intact. An investigation is made of factorization structures (especially for single morphisms) and their relationships to strong limit operators and to the Pumplu¨n-Ro¨hrl Galois correspondence between classes of objects and classes of morphisms in any category. Many examples as well as internal characterizations of Galois-closed classes are provided.     

Efficiency analysis, shortage functions, arbitrage, and martingales

This paper shows that standard tools of efficiency analysis, directional distance functions, can be used to characterize the investment-returns technology. That ability to characterize the investment-returns technology and fundamental duality relationships imply that directional distance functions can be used to detect the presence of an arbitrage, to value financial assets in the absence of an arbitrage lying in the span of the market and to place bounds on the no-arbitrage values of assets lying outside the span of the market.     

Contractualism, Politics, and Morality

Rawls developed a contractualist theory of social justice and Scanlon attempted to extend the Rawlsian framework to develop a theory of rightness, or morality more generally. I argue that there are some good reasons to adopt a contractualist theory of social justice, but that it is a mistake to adopt a contractualist theory of rightness. I begin by illustrating the major shared features of Scanlon and Rawls’ theories. I then show that the justification for these features in Rawls’ theory, the centrality of cooperative fairness to social justice, cannot be used to defend their use in Scanlon’s. Finally, I argue that Scanlon has not provided an adequate alternative defense of these features, and show that they create problems when contractualists try to explain major features of our common-sense morality.     

Transformations,Implementations, and Pitfalls

Transformations are ubiquitous in practically every field of signal processing and the choice of the right transformation can be crucial for extracting the information from the data. In computational practice, however, the fact that one tries to implement an infinite transformation defined on a continuum for finite discrete data can lead to unwanted and often also unexpected effects. Using the example of the continuous wavelet transform, this note points to some of these effects and gives explanation why this happens and how it can be avoided. (© 2011 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Development of elementary teachers' science,technology, engineering,arts, and mathematics planning practices

The purpose of this instrumental case study was to understand elementary teachers' planning of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) curriculum during a two-year professional development experience. This research was guided by the following question: What planning practices developed or changed during a professional development experience? Analysis of 25 teachers' planning documents indicated growth in the following areas: (a) tighter alignment to fewer standards, (b) more meaningful integration and broader definitions of arts and technology, and (c) increased use of formative assessment but persistent difficulties in summatively assessing the multiple disciplines of STEAM. The growth in teachers' STEAM instruction from the beginning to the end of this two-year professional development was important in building our understanding of what constitutes sound design of STEAM inquiries.     

MV-代数、BL-代数、R0-代数与多值逻辑

证明三种不同形式的MV－代数刻画的等价性，分析MV－代数、BL－代数与R0代数的逻辑背景，提出若干可进一步研究的课题。     

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.     

Connections in Proportional Reasoning: Levers,Arithmetic Means,Mixtures, Batting Averages,and Speeds

The lever is used to give an alternate physical representation of, and as a means to connect, situations that involve weighted averages and inverse proportionality, such as arithmetic means, mixtures, batting averages, and speeds. Geometric representations of the situations are also provided as another way to make connections.     

Optimality,identifiability, and sensitivity

Around a solution of an optimization problem, an “identifiable” subset of the feasible region is one containing all nearby solutions after small perturbations to the problem. A quest for only the most essential ingredients of sensitivity analysis leads us to consider identifiable sets that are “minimal”. This new notion lays a broad and intuitive variational-analytic foundation for optimality conditions, sensitivity, and active set methods.     

Cayley compositions,partitions, polytopes,and geometric bijections

In 1857, Cayley showed that certain sequences, now called Cayley compositions, are equinumerous with certain partitions into powers of 2. In this paper we give a simple bijective proof of this result and a geometric generalization to equality of Ehrhart polynomials between two convex polytopes. We then apply our results to give a new proof of Braun?s conjecture proved recently by the authors [15].     

Dispositions, Laws, and Categories

After a short sketch of Lowe’s account of his four basic categories, I discuss his theory of formal ontological relations and how Lowe wants to account for dispositional predications. I argue that on the ontic level Lowe is a pan-categoricalist, while he is a language dualist and an exemplification dualist with regard to the dispositional/categorical distinction. I argue that Lowe does not present an adequate account of disposition. From an Aristotelian point of view, Lowe conflates dispositional predication with hôs epi to poly statements about what is normally or mostly the case.     

Wave propagation in,layered, transversally isotropic,elastic media

Wave propagation in a transversally isotropic, elastic medium consisting of plane-parallel layers and half spaces is considered. A generalized matrix method is used to derive the dispersion equation of this medium and to find the coefficients of reflection and refraction. This method makes it possible to consider dispersion curves and the coeffients of reflection and refraction in a broader domain than with Haskell's method. The results obtained generalize to layers in which the elastic characteristics vary with depth according to an arbitrary law. For such layers it is possible to find matrices in the form of series which converge rapidly for low and high frequencies. Moreover, a rule is formulated which makes it possible on the basis of a known field in an isotropic medium to find the field in the corresponding transversally isotropic medium.     

Thermally coupled,stationary, incompressible MHD flow; existence,uniqueness, and finite element approximation

This article addresses the questions of existence, uniqueness, and finite element approximation (including some computational aspects) of solutions to the equations of steady-state magnetohy-drodynamic (MHD) when buoyancy effects due to temperature differences in the flow cannot be neglected. We couple the MHD equations to the heat equation and employ the well-known Boussinesq approximation. We consider the equations posed on a bounded three-dimensional domain. The boundary conditions for the velocity are of Dirichlet type; the boundary conditions for the temperature are mixed (of Dirichlet type and of Neumann type); we also specify the normal component of the magnetic field and tangential component of the electric field on the boundary. We point out that these problems are relevant to many physical phenomena such as the cooling of nuclear reactors by electrically conducting fluids, continuous metal casting, crystal growth, and semi-conductor manufacture. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Segments,rectangles, contours

Two sets H and V of horizontal and vertical segments, respectively, determine a subdivision M of the plane into regions. A nontrivial region is one whose boundary contains an end-portion of nonzero length of at least one segment, and the nontrivial contour of M is the collection of boundaries of nontrivial regions. In this paper we consider several problems pertaining to H and V, such as the construction of the nontrivial contour of M, of the external contour of M, and of a path between two points in the plane avoiding the segments (route-in-a-maze). We show that, if |H| + |V| = n, all of these problems are solved in time O(n log n), by making use of a static data structure, called the adjacency map, which can be searched in time O(log n) and can be constructed in time O(n log n). The algorithms for the nontrivial and external contour are shown to be optimal.