Constructing Space for Science at the Royal Institution of Great Britain

Those who have worked in the Royal Institution of Great Britain have, since its foundation in 1799, made significant contributions to scientific knowledge, to its practical application, and to its communication to a wide variety of audiences. Such work cannot be carried out in an architectural vacuum, and in this paper we examine how the buildings of the Royal Institution, 20 and 21 Albemarle Street in central London, have shaped the work undertaken within its walls and how, on a number of occasions, the buildings have been reconfigured to take account of the evolving needs of scientific research and communication. This paper is based on the Conservation Plan of the Royal Institution that we wrote during 2003. The Conservation Plan did not examine the land owned by the Royal Institution to the north (i.e., 22 and 23 Albemarle Street; for this area see Richard Garnier, “Grafton Street, Mayfair,” Georgian Group Journal 13 (2003), 210–272), but it did discuss 18 and 19 Albemarle Street. In this paper we concentrate on the core Royal Institution buildings at 20 and 21 Albemarle Street. Other studies of the relationship of architecture,space, and science include Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar, ed., Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Peter Galison and Emily Thompson, ed., The Architecture of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); and Sophie Forgan,“The architecture of science and the idea of a university,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989), 405–434. Frank A.J.L. James is Professor of the History of Science at the Royal Institution; he has written widely on the history of nineteenth-century science in its social and cultural contexts and is editor of the Correspondence of Michael Faraday. He is President of the British Society for the History of Science. Anthony Peers is an Associate of Rodney Melville and Partners where he works in the field of building conservation as an architectural historian. He is a Council member of the Ancient Monument Society.     

Generalization of a sharp Hölder's inequality and its application

In this paper, we generalize Hu Ke's sharpness of Hölder's inequality. As application, the obtained result is used to improve the well-known Opial-Olech inequality.     

Some inequalities for characteristic functions. II

Recently we established Matysiak and Szablowski's conjecture [V. Matysiak, P.J. Szablowski, Theory Probab. Appl. 45 (2001) 711-713] about a lower bound of real-valued characteristic functions. In this paper, applying an alternative approach we are able to give explicitly the ranges of argument for which the obtained inequalities hold true for general characteristic functions.     

关于Landau不等式

本文给出Landau不等式的一种改进。     

Lower bounds for transition probabilities on graphs

The paper presents two results. The first one provides separate conditions for the upper and lower estimates of the distribution of the time of exit from balls of a random walk on a weighted graph. The main result of the paper is that the lower estimate follows from the elliptic Harnack inequality. The second result is an off-diagonal lower bound for the transition probability of the random walk.     

带有奇异项的临界增长p-Laplace方程的非平凡解

本文研究了一种带有奇异项的临界增长p-Laplace方程在N维空间中的有界集上非平凡解的问题,利用山路引理和集中紧性原理,得出方程在非线性项满足一定条件下有非平凡解的结果.     

Concentration inequalities for random fields via coupling

We present a new and simple approach to concentration inequalities in the context of dependent random processes and random fields. Our method is based on coupling and does not use information inequalities. In case one has a uniform control on the coupling, one obtains exponential concentration inequalities. If such a uniform control is no more possible, then one obtains polynomial or stretched-exponential concentration inequalities. Our abstract results apply to Gibbs random fields, both at high and low temperatures and in particular to the low-temperature Ising model which is a concrete example of non-uniformity of the coupling.      

关于两类重要微分不等式

本文研究了两类重要微分不等式有界解的性质。引入了赋范线性空间(f,‖‖M),利用比较定理和黎卡提方程解的性质,给出了有界解的上界估计式,推广和改进了文[1,2]中的有关结果.     

Nontrivial Solutions for Resonant Hemivariational Inequalities

We study a resonant semilinear elliptic hemivariational inequality. Under some assumptions of strong resonance on the Clarke subdifferential of the superpotential, and using nonsmooth critical point theory, the existence of a nontrivial solution of the problem is shown. This paper has been partially supported by the State Committee for Scientific Research of Poland (KBN) under research grants no. 2 P03A 003 25 and no. 4 T07A 027 26.     

Nonlinear Schrödinger equations with symmetric multi-polar potentials

This paper deals with a class of nonlinear elliptic equations involving a critical power-nonlinearity as well as a potential featuring multiple inverse square singularities. When the poles form a symmetric structure, it is natural we wonder how the symmetry affects such mutual interaction. The present paper means to study this aspect from the point of view of the existence of solutions inheriting the same symmetry properties as the set of singularities. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000) 35J60, 35J20, 35B33