Rotating Charge Coupled to the Maxwell Field: Scattering Theory and Adiabatic Limit

We consider a spinning charge coupled to the Maxwell field. Through the appropriate symmetry in the initial conditions the charge remains at rest. We establish that any time-dependent finite energy solution converges to a sum of a soliton wave and an outgoing free wave. The convergence holds in global energy norm. Under a small constant external magnetic field the soliton manifold is stable in local energy seminorms and the evolution of the angular velocity is guided by an effective finite-dimensional dynamics. The proof uses a non-autonomous integral inequality method.     

Indexing Distributions of Data: Preservice Teachers' Notions of Representativeness

The purpose of the study was to identify strategies used by preservice elementary teachers to index distributions of data. A secondary purpose of the study was to investigate whether representational form influenced the type of representative values constructed. Two hundred eighty‐three preservice teachers were administered a selection of tasks requiring them to construct representative values for a variety of distributional shapes. Participants were asked to provide justifications for their chosen representative measures. Data were analyzed from two perspectives: nature and adequacy of representative measure. Results indicated that when presented with skewed data sets, over half of the participants constructed poorly representative values. Symmetric data sets were best indexed with 67% of participants constructing highly representative values. Representational form played a significant role in determining representative values. Data presented graphically were more likely to be represented using measures of variability than were those presented nongraphically. Conversely, measures of central tendency were more frequently used to represent nongraphical data. The information arising from this study indicates that many preservice teachers construct poorly representative values to index data sets and utilize identical measures of representativeness regardless of distributional shape. The findings of the study highlight the need for exploratory data activities at the preservice level, call for provision of experiences affording insights into construction of representative values, and thus, have implications for the design of preservice mathematics education curricula.     

Constructions of economic functions and calculations of marginal rates in DEA using parametric optimization methods

The aim of the paper is to present and substantiate a technique to visualize DEA modelling results without any loss of mathematical rigour. The proposed family of parametric optimization methods allows one to construct an intersection of the multidimensional frontier with a two-dimensional plane determined by any pair of given directions. This approach reduces the efficiency analysis of production units to the investigation of well-known functions in economics. We also propose constructive methods to calculate marginal rates of substitution, marginal rates of transformation and so on.     

Gray code for derangements

We give a Gray code and constant average time generating algorithm for derangements, i.e., permutations with no fixed points. In our Gray code, each derangement is transformed into its successor either via one or two transpositions or a rotation of three elements. We generalize these results to permutations with number of fixed points bounded between two constants.