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This book presents highlights of recent work in arithmetic algebraic geometry by some of the world's leading mathematicians. Together, these 2016 lectures—which were delivered in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the annual summer workshops in Alpbach, Austria—provide an introduction to high-level research on three topics: Shimura varieties, hyperelliptic continued fractions and generalized Jacobians, and Faltings heights and L-functions. The book consists of notes, written by young researchers, on three sets of lectures or minicourses given at Alpbach. The first course contains recent results dealing with the local Langlands conjecture. The fundamental question is whether for a given datum there exists a so-called local Shimura variety. In some cases, they exist in the category of rigid analytic spaces; in others, one has to use Scholze's perfectoid spaces. The second course addresses the famous Pell equation—not in the classical setting but rather with the so-called polynomial Pell equation, where the integers are replaced by polynomials in one variable with complex coefficients, which leads to the study of hyperelliptic continued fractions and generalized Jacobians. The third course originates in the Chowla–Selberg formula and relates values of the L-function for elliptic curves with the height of Heegner points on the curves. It proves the Gross–Zagier formula on Shimura curves and verifies the Colmez conjecture on average.

How to Free Your Inner Mathematician: Notes on Mathematics and Life offers readers guidance in managing the fear, freedom, frustration, and joy that often accompany calls to think mathematically. With practical insight and years of award-winning mathematics teaching experience, DAgostino offers more than 300 hand-drawn sketches alongside accessible descriptions of fractals, symmetry, fuzzy logic, knot theory, Penrose patterns, infinity, the Twin Prime Conjecture, Arrows Impossibility Theorem, Fermats Last Theorem, and other intriguing mathematical topics. Readers are encouraged to embrace change, proceed at their own pace, mix up their routines, resist comparison, have faith, fail more often, look for beauty, exercise their imaginations, and define success for themselves. Mathematics students and enthusiasts will learn advice for fostering courage on their journey regardless of age or mathematical background. How to Free Your Inner Mathematician delivers not only engaging mathematical content but provides reassurance that mathematical success has more to do with curiosity and drive than innate aptitude.

This book describes the latest advances in the theory of mean field games, which are optimal control problems with a continuum of players, each of them interacting with the whole statistical distribution of a population. While it originated in economics, this theory now has applications in areas as diverse as mathematical finance, crowd phenomena, epidemiology, and cybersecurity. Because mean field games concern the interactions of infinitely many players in an optimal control framework, one expects them to appear as the limit for Nash equilibria of differential games with finitely many players as the number of players tends to infinity. The book rigorously establishes this convergence, which has been an open problem until now. The limit of the system associated with differential games with finitely many players is described by the so-called master equation, a nonlocal transport equation in the space of measures. After defining a suitable notion of differentiability in the space of measures, the authors provide a complete self-contained analysis of the master equation. Their analysis includes the case of common noise problems in which all the players are affected by a common Brownian motion. They then go on to explain how to use the master equation to prove the mean field limit. The book presents two important new results in mean field games that contribute to a unified theoretical framework for this exciting and fast-developing area of mathematics.

This book is a technical, historical, and conceptual investigation into the three main methodological approaches to the computational sciences: mathematical, engineering, and experimental. Part I explores the background behind the formal understanding of computing, originating at the end of the nineteenth century, and it invesitagtes the formal origins and conceptual development of the notions of computation, algorithm, and program.Part II overviews the construction of physical devices to performautomated tasks and it considers associated technical and conceptual issues. It starts with the design and construction of the first generation of computingmachines, explores their evolution and progress in engineering (for both hardware and software), and investigates their theoretical and conceptual problems. Part III analyses the methods and principles of experimental sciences founded on computationalmethods. It studies the use ofmachines to performscientific tasks,with particular reference to computer models and simulations. Each part aims at defining a notion of computational validity according to the corresponding methodological approach.

Reverse mathematics is a new field that seeks to find the axioms needed to prove given theorems. Reverse mathematics began as a technical field of mathematical logic, but its main ideas have precedents in the ancient field of geometry and the early twentieth-century field of set theory. This book offers a historical and representative view, emphasizing basic analysis and giving a novel approach to logic. It concludes that mathematics is an arena where theorems cannot always be proved outright, but in which all of their logical equivalents can be found. This creates the possibility of reverse mathematics, where one seeks equivalents that are suitable as axioms. By using a minimum of mathematical logic in a well-motivated way, the book will engage advanced undergraduates and all mathematicians interested in the foundations of mathematics.