The multidisciplinary field of quantum computing strives to exploit some of the uncanny aspects of quantum mechanics to expand our computational horizons. Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists takes readers on a tour of this fascinating area of cutting-edge research. Written in an accessible yet rigorous fashion, this book employs ideas and techniques familiar to every student of computer science. The reader is not expected to have any advanced mathematics or physics background. After presenting the necessary prerequisites, the material is organized to look at different aspects of quantum computing from the specific standpoint of computer science. There are chapters on computer architecture, algorithms, programming languages, theoretical computer science, cryptography, information theory, and hardware. The text has step-by-step examples, more than two hundred exercises with solutions, and programming drills that bring the ideas of quantum computing alive for today's computer science students and researchers.

Written by noted quantum computing theorist Scott Aaronson, this book takes readers on a tour through some of the deepest ideas of maths, computer science and physics. Full of insights, arguments and philosophical perspectives, the book covers an amazing array of topics. Beginning in antiquity with Democritus, it progresses through logic and set theory, computability and complexity theory, quantum computing, cryptography, the information content of quantum states and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. There are also extended discussions about time travel, Newcomb's Paradox, the anthropic principle and the views of Roger Penrose. Aaronson's informal style makes this fascinating book accessible to readers with scientific backgrounds, as well as students and researchers working in physics, computer science, mathematics and philosophy.

This book provides the first unifying analysis of the range of economic reasons for the clustering of firms and households. Its goal is to explain further the trade-off between various forms of increasing returns and different types of mobility costs. The main focus of the analysis is on cities, but it also explores the formation of other agglomerations, such as commercial districts within cities, industrial clusters at the regional level, and the existence of imbalance between regions.

In this book, Smalltalk pioneer and guru, Kent Beck, weaves together a collection of his landmark articles from leading IT trade journals--The Smalltalk Report, JOOP, and Object Magazine. Written for Smalltalk programmers, this book is designed to help readers become more effective Smalltalk developers and object technology users. It is filled with insider tips, advanced techniques, and proven strategies on getting the most out of the Smalltalk language. Some specific topics covered are patterns, garbage collection, the use of CRC cards, and much more.

Arising out of the author's lifetime fascination with the links between the formal language of mathematical models and natural language, this short book comprises five essays investigating both the economics of language and the language of economics. Ariel Rubinstein touches on the structure imposed on binary relations in daily language, the evolutionary development of the meaning of words, game-theoretical considerations of pragmatics, the language of economic agents and the rhetoric of game theory. These short essays are full of challenging ideas for social scientists that should help to encourage a fundamental rethinking of many of the underlying assumptions in economic theory and game theory.

The Skeptical Environmentalist challenges widely held beliefs that the environmental situation is getting worse and worse. The author, himself a former member of Greenpeace, is critical of the way in which many environmental organisations make selective and misleading use of the scientific evidence. Using the best available statistical information from internationally recognised research institutes, Bjørn Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental problems that feature prominently in headline news across the world. His arguments are presented in non-technical, accessible language and are carefully backed up by over 2500 footnotes allowing readers to check sources for themselves. Concluding that there are more reasons for optimism than pessimism, Bjørn Lomborg stresses the need for clear-headed prioritisation of resources to tackle real, not imagined problems. The Skeptical Environmentalist offers readers a non-partisan stocktaking exercise that serves as a useful corrective to the more alarmist accounts favoured by campaign groups and the media.

This mathematically elementary introduction to the theory of options pricing presents the Black-Scholes theory of options as well as introducing such topics in finance as the time value of money, mean variance analysis, optimal portfolio selection, and the capital assets pricing model. The author assumes no prior knowledge of probability and presents all the necessary preliminary material simply and clearly. He explains the concept of arbitrage with examples, and then uses the arbitrage theorem, along with an approximation of geometric Brownian motion, to obtain a simple derivation of the Black-Scholes formula. In the later chapters he presents real price data indicating that this model is not always appropriate and shows how the model can be generalized to deal with such situations. No other text presents such topics in a mathematically accurate but accessible way. It will appeal to professional traders as well as undergraduates studying the basics of finance.

Cambridge Preparation for the TOEFL® Test, Fourth Edition, helps students master the language skills they need to succeed on the TOEFL® iBT and communicate effectively in an academic setting. Using an integrated skills approach that mirrors the structure of the TOEFL® iBT, this fully revised text is ideal for classroom use and self-study. The book contains hundreds of skill-building exercises covering all of the question types in the exam and four practice tests. A supporting skills section is provided to improve grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and study skills. The CD-ROM includes the tests from the book plus three additional practice tests in an electronic format that simulates the online TOEFL® iBT. The audio program, available on Audio CDs or Audio Cassettes, contains conversations, lectures, and all listening material for all listening exercises and test questions.

Mathematician and popular science author Eugenia Cheng is on a mission to show you that mathematics can be flexible, creative, and visual. This joyful journey through the world of abstract mathematics into category theory will demystify mathematical thought processes and help you develop your own thinking, with no formal mathematical background needed. The book brings abstract mathematical ideas down to earth using examples of social justice, current events, and everyday life - from privilege to COVID-19 to driving routes. The journey begins with the ideas and workings of abstract mathematics, after which you will gently climb toward more technical material, learning everything needed to understand category theory, and then key concepts in category theory like natural transformations, duality, and even a glimpse of ongoing research in higher-dimensional category theory. For fans of How to Bake Pi, this will help you dig deeper into mathematical concepts and build your mathematical background.

Category theory provides a general conceptual framework that has proved fruitful in subjects as diverse as geometry, topology, theoretical computer science and foundational mathematics. Here is a friendly, easy-to-read textbook that explains the fundamentals at a level suitable for newcomers to the subject. Beginning postgraduate mathematicians will find this book an excellent introduction to all of the basics of category theory. It gives the basic definitions; goes through the various associated gadgetry, such as functors, natural transformations, limits and colimits; and then explains adjunctions. The material is slowly developed using many examples and illustrations to illuminate the concepts explained. Over 200 exercises, with solutions available online, help the reader to access the subject and make the book ideal for self-study. It can also be used as a recommended text for a taught introductory course.

The Iconography of Landscape draws together fourteen scholars from diverse disciplines to explore the status of landscape as a cultural image. By applying the art-historical method of iconography--interpreting levels of meaning in human artifacts--to landscapes on paper or canvas, in literary form or on the ground, its contributors show how landscape is an important mode of human signification, informed by, and itself informing social, cultural and political issues. The range of examples is wide in terms of medium, period and place. It covers poetry and promotional literature, architectural design and urban ceremonial maps and paintings; the historical periods discussed range from sixteenth-century Italy to twentieth-century Canada. The book is introduced by the editors' discussion of the meanings of landscape and of the iconographic method in the context of contemporary theoretical and methodological debate on culture and society.

This book is an attempt to change our thinking about thinking. Anna Sfard undertakes this task convinced that many long-standing, seemingly irresolvable quandaries regarding human development originate in ambiguities of the existing discourses on thinking. Standing on the shoulders of Vygotsky and Wittgenstein, the author defines thinking as a form of communication. The disappearance of the time-honoured thinking-communicating dichotomy is epitomised by Sfard's term, commognition, which combines communication with cognition. The commognitive tenet implies that verbal communication with its distinctive property of recursive self-reference may be the primary source of humans' unique ability to accumulate the complexity of their action from one generation to another. The explanatory power of the commognitive framework and the manner in which it contributes to our understanding of human development is illustrated through commognitive analysis of mathematical discourse accompanied by vignettes from mathematics classrooms.

It is now thirty years since the discovery of AIDS but its origins continue to puzzle doctors and scientists. Inspired by his own experiences working as an infectious diseases physician in Africa, Jacques Pepin looks back to the early twentieth-century events in Africa that triggered the emergence of HIV/AIDS and traces its subsequent development into the most dramatic and destructive epidemic of modern times. He shows how the disease was first transmitted from chimpanzees to man and then how urbanization, prostitution, and large-scale colonial medical campaigns intended to eradicate tropical diseases combined to disastrous effect to fuel the spread of the virus from its origins in Léopoldville to the rest of Africa, the Caribbean and ultimately worldwide. This is an essential new perspective on HIV/AIDS and on the lessons that must be learnt if we are to avoid provoking another pandemic in the future.

The field of ancient Greek ethics is increasingly emerging as a major branch of philosophical enquiry, and students and scholars of ancient philosophy will find this Companion to be a rich and invaluable guide to the themes and movements which characterised the discipline from the Pre-Socratics to the Neo-Platonists. Several chapters are dedicated to the central figures of Plato and Aristotle, and others explore the ethical thought of the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Skeptics, and Plotinus. Further chapters examine important themes that cut across these schools, including virtue and happiness, friendship, elitism, impartiality, and the relationship between ancient eudaimonism and modern morality. Written by leading scholars and drawing on cutting-edge research to illuminate the questions of ancient ethics, the book will provide students and specialists with an indispensable critical overview of the full range of ancient Greek ethics.

In this wide-ranging study, Ghassan Moazzin sheds critical new light on the history of foreign banks in late 19th and early 20th century China, a time period that saw a substantial influx of foreign financial institutions into China and a rapid increase of both China's foreign trade and its interactions with international capital markets. Drawing on a broad range of German, English, Japanese and Chinese primary sources, including business records, government documents and personal papers, Moazzin reconstructs how during this period foreign banks facilitated China's financial integration into the first global economy and provided the financial infrastructure required for modern economic globalization in China. Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China shows the key role international finance and foreign banks and capital markets played at important turning points in modern Chinese history.

Since their inception, the Perspectives in Logic and Lecture Notes in Logic series have published seminal works by leading logicians. Many of the original books in the series have been unavailable for years, but they are now in print once again. In this volume, the tenth publication in the Perspectives in Logic series, Jens E. Fenstad takes an axiomatic approach to present a unified and coherent account of the many and various parts of general recursion theory. The main core of the book gives an account of the general theory of computations. The author then moves on to show how computation theories connect with and unify other parts of general recursion theory. Some mathematical maturity is required of the reader, who is assumed to have some acquaintance with recursion theory. This book is ideal for a second course in the subject.

This volume describes the various movements and thinkers who wanted social change without state intervention. It covers cases in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. The first part discusses early egalitarian experiments and ideologies in Asia, Europe and the Islamic world, and then moves to early socialist thinkers in Britain, France, and Germany. The second part deals with the rise of the two main currents in socialist movements after 1848: anarchism in its multiple varieties, and Marxism. It also pays attention to organisational forms, including the International Working Men's Association (later called the First International); and it then follows the further development of anarchism and its 'proletarian' sibling, revolutionary syndicalism – its rise and decline from the 1870s until the 1940s on different continents. The volume concludes with critical essays on anarchist transnationalism and the recent revival of anarchism and syndicalism in several parts of the world.