Book reviews

PHYSICS, WITH ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES FROM MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY. VOLUME 1: MECHANICS, by George [euro]3. Benedek and Felix M. H. Villars, Addison Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts 1974. ($7.95)

NOMOGRAPHS FOR ELECTRONICS. INSTANT CALCULATIONS FOR DESIGNERS, by Robert L. Peters. Cahners Books, 89 Franklin Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02 1 10. ISBN: 0-8436-0204-X. Catalog Code: NEPE. (21 1.25)     

Total synthesis of (−)-seimatopolide A

The total synthesis of (?)-seimatopolide A is described in a linear fashion with high yielding steps. The key reactions include Lu’s isomerization, Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation and Kita’s macrolactonization.     

Light driven mesoscale assembly of a coordination polymeric gelator into flowers and stars with distinct properties

Control over the self-assembly process of porous organic–inorganic hybrids often leads to unprecedented polymorphism and properties. Herein we demonstrate how light can be a powerful tool to intervene in the kinetically controlled mesoscale self-assembly of a coordination polymeric gelator. Ultraviolet light induced coordination modulation via photoisomerisation of an azobenzene based dicarboxylate linker followed by aggregation mediated crystal growth resulted in two distinct morphological forms (flowers and stars), which show subtle differences in their physical properties.     

Ruthenium catalyzed desymmetrization of diazabicyclic olefins to access heteroaryl substituted cyclopentenes through C–H activation of phenylazoles

The first ruthenium catalyzed redox-neutral C–H activation strategy for the ring-opening of diazabicyclic olefins via C–H bond cleavage of phenyl azoles is reported. The developed method offers a novel route to functionalized cyclopentenes by employing less-expensive ruthenium catalyst and readily accessible biologically significant heteroarenes. The present protocol is a merger of the C–H activation of phenyl substituted heteroaromatics and subsequent β-nitrogen elimination of diazabicyclic olefins.     

Off-line dynamic maintenance of the width of a planar point set

Agarwal, P.K. and M. Sharir, Off-line dynamic maintenance of the width of a planar point set, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications 1 (1990) 65-78. In this paper we present an efficient algorithm for the off-line dynamic maintenance of the width of a planar point set in the following restricted case: We are given a real parameter W and a sequence Σ=(σ₁,...,σ_n) of n insert and delete operations on a set S of points in ², initially consisting of n points, and we want to determine whether there is an i such that the width of S the ith operation is less than or equal to W. Our algorithm runs in time O(nlog³n) and uses O(n) space.