Optic Fiber Interferometer for Absolute Distance Measurement

1.IntroductionAbsolutedistancemeasurementisfarfromanewtopic.However,itisstillafieldstimulatinggreatinterestsnowadaysduetoitSimportantroleinmanufacturingandassembly['J.SincethegreatsuccessachievedbyMichelsonandBenoitwhentheyfirstdevelopedaninterferometertodeterminethestandardmeterintermsofthemonochromaticredcadmiumline,theopticinterferometerhasbeenprovedtobeoneofthemostpreciseandefficientwayindisplacementmeasurementbecauseofitshighdiscriminationandsimplestructure.However,thetraditionalinterfe…     

Radiation bursts from particles in the field of compact, impenetrable, astrophysical objects

The radiation emitted by charged, scalar particles in a Schwarzschild field with maximal acceleration corrections is calculated classically and in the tree approximation of quantum field theory. In both instances the particles emit radiation that has characteristics similar to those of gamma-ray bursters.     

Minimal Ellipsoid Circumscribing a Polytope Defined by a System of Linear Inequalities

In this paper, we will propose algorithms for calculating a minimal ellipsoid circumscribing a polytope defined by a system of linear inequalities. If we know all vertices of the polytope and its cardinality is not very large, we can solve the problem in an efficient manner by a number of existent algorithms. However, when the polytope is defined by linear inequalities, these algorithms may not work since the cardinality of vertices may be huge. Based on a fact that vertices determining an ellipsoid are only a fraction of these vertices, we propose algorithms which iteratively calculate an ellipsoid which covers a subset of vertices. Numerical experiment shows that these algorithms perform well for polytopes of dimension up to seven.     

Necessary Conditions for Differentiability of Distance Functions

Necessary conditions for the Gâteaux differentiability of the distance function to a set are considered. A series of characterizing results is obtained.     

Irregularities of distribution with respect to strips

Summary A lower bound is established for the strip discrepancy of a broad class of point distributions. The bound implies unbounded strip discrepancy for equally weighted point distributions under favorable conditions. The methods of proof use notions from integral geometry.     

The Kissing Triangles: The Aesthetics of Mathematical Discovery

Papert's (1978) appeal to reconsider the power and possibilities of the aesthetic in mathematics learning is often ignored in mathematics education research. This paper begins with the premise, put forth by Dewey (1934), that the aesthetic structures many dimensions of inquiry and experience. In the same way that using particular paintings, musical compositions, or even everyday experiences has been instrumental to attempts by philosophers to understand the aesthetic dimensions of meaning and experience in artistic domains, I propose that analysing a particular encounter with mathematics may help reveal the nature and role of the often nebulous responses of elegance, beauty, and `fit' to which mathematicians lay claim in their mathematical activity. To achieve this, I draw on and adapt the defining features of the aesthetic character of experience set forth by the aesthetician Beardsley (1982). This, in turn, sheds light on the role thataesthetics can play in mathematical inquiry and experience, and provides initial categories and conjectures that can be used to investigate the potential roles of aesthetics in mathematics learning contexts.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Projective geometry and special relativity

Some concepts of real and complex projective geometry are applied to the fundamental physical notions that relate to Minkowski space and the Lorentz group. In particular, it is shown that the transition from an infinite speed of propagation for light waves to a finite one entails the replacement of a hyperplane at infinity with a light cone and the replacement of an affine hyperplane – or rest space – with a proper time hyperboloid. The transition from the metric theory of electromagnetism to the pre‐metric theory is discussed in the context of complex projective geometry, and ultimately, it is proposed that the geometrical issues are more general than electromagnetism, namely, they pertain to the transition from point mechanics to wave mechanics.     

FFT-based algorithms for the string matching with mismatches problem

The string matching with mismatches problem requires finding the Hamming distance between a pattern P of length m and every length m substring of text T with length n. Fischer and Paterson's FFT-based algorithm solves the problem without error in O(σnlogm), where σ is the size of the alphabet Σ [SIAM–AMS Proc. 7 (1973) 113–125]. However, this in the worst case reduces to O(nmlogm). Atallah, Chyzak and Dumas used the idea of randomly mapping the letters of the alphabet to complex roots of unity to estimate the score vector in time O(nlogm) [Algorithmica 29 (2001) 468–486]. We show that the algorithm's score variance can be substantially lowered by using a bijective mapping, and specifically to zero in the case of binary and ternary alphabets. This result is extended via alphabet remappings to deterministically solve the string matching with mismatches problem with a constant factor of 2 improvement over Fischer–Paterson's method.     

Bit-parallel approximate string matching algorithms with transposition

Using bit-parallelism has resulted in fast and practical algorithms for approximate string matching under Levenshtein edit distance, which permits a single edit operation to insert, delete or substitute a character. Depending on the parameters of the search, currently the fastest non-filtering algorithms in practice are the O(km/wn) algorithm of Wu and Manber, the O((k+2)(m−k)/wn) algorithm of Baeza-Yates and Navarro, and the O(m/wn) algorithm of Myers, where m is the pattern length, n is the text length, k is the error threshold and w is the computer word size. In this paper we discuss a uniform way of modifying each of these algorithms to permit also a fourth type of edit operation: transposing two adjacent characters in the pattern. This type of edit distance is also known as Damerau edit distance. In the end we also present an experimental comparison of the resulting algorithms.