This new edition is updated...

Held for the ?rst time outside Europe, the 15th International Conference on DiscreteGeometryforComputer ImagerytookplaceinMontr' eal(Canada)from September30toOctober2,2009.Thisconferenceaddressedalargeinternational audience: 61 papers were submitted originating from 14 di?erent countries. Following a thorough reviewing process, remodeled...

Biology has inspired electronics from the very beginning: the machines that we now call computers are deeply rooted in biological metaphors. Pioneers such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann openly declared their aim of creating arti?cial machines that could mimic some of the behaviors exhibited by natural organisms. Unfortunately, technology...

Optimization is generally a reduction operation of a definite quantity. This process naturally takes place in our environment and through our activities. For example, many natural systems evolve, in order to minimize their potential energy. Modeling these phenomena then largely relies on our capacity to artificially reproduce these processes....

A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition
 
As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of...

The contribution of the Dutch craftsman and scholar Isaac Beeckman to early modern scientific thought has never been properly acknowledged. Surprisingly free from the constraints of traditional natural philosophy, he developed a view of the world in which everything, from the motion of the heavens to musical harmonies, is explained by...

In many application areas, it is necessary to make effective decisions under constraints. Several area-specific techniques are known for such decision problems; however, because these techniques are area-specific, it is not easy to apply each technique to other applications areas. Cross-fertilization between different application areas is one...

The modules cover nonrelativistic quantum mechanics,...

Communication, one of the most important functions of life, occurs at any spatial scale from the molecular one up to that of populations and ecosystems, and any time scale from that of fast chemical reactions up to that of geological ages. Information theory, a mathematical science of communication initiated by Shannon in 1948, has been very...