Note on varying speed of light cosmologies

The various requirements on a consistent varying speed of light (‘VSL’) theory are surveyed, giving a short check-list that needs to be satisfied by such theories.     

Flat rank of automorphism groups of buildings

The flat rank of a totally disconnected locally compact group G, denoted flat-rk(G), is an invariant of the topological group structure of G. It is defined thanks to a natural distance on the space of compact open subgroups of G. For a topological Kac-Moody group G with Weyl group W, we derive the inequalities alg-rk(W) ≤ flat-rk(G) ≤ rk(|W|₀). Here, alg-rk(W) is the maximal Z-rank of abelian subgroups of W, and rk(|W|₀) is the maximal dimension of isometrically embedded flats in the CAT0-realization |W|₀. We can prove these inequalities under weaker assumptions. We also show that for any integer n ≥ 1 there is a simple, compactly generated, locally compact, totally disconnected group G, with flat-rk(G) = n and which is not linear.     

Lattice gas generalization of the hard hexagon model. II. The local densities as elliptic functions

In a previous paper we considered an extension of the hard hexagon model to a solvable two-dimensional lattice gas with at most two particles per pair of adjacent sites. Here we use various mathematical identities (in particular Gordon's generalization of the Rogers-Ramanujan relations) to express the local densities in terms of elliptic functions. The critical behavior is then readily obtained.Supported in part by the National Science Foundation Grant MCS 8201733.     

Ramsey numbers for graphs with five vertices

The Ramsey numbers r(F¹, F²) are tabulated for essentially all but six pairs of graphs F¹ and F² with five vertices.     

The Nature of Community OR

This paper outlines the results of a study undertaken to investigate the nature of Community Operational Research (COR). The objective was to contact the people involved in COR through a series of personal interviews and a questionnaire survey, in order to clarify many of the issues that have emerged within the profession relating to the practice of OR within the community and voluntary sector. A total of 20 individuals were successfully contacted, and they have been responsible for at least two-thirds of the projects in the COR area.