The origin of queueing theory and its application traces back to Erlang’s historical work for telephony networks as recently celebrated by the Erlang Centennial, 100 Years of Queueing, Copenhagen, recalling his first paper in 1909. Ever since, the simplicity and fundamental flavour of Erlang’s famous expressions, such as his...

When I began writing this book, I spent quite a bit of time searching for a good quote to start things off. I ended up with two. R is a wonderfully flexible platform and language for exploring, visualizing, and understanding data. I chose the quote from Alice in Wonderland to capture the flavor of statistical analysis today—an...

When we rst started working on the problem of making the kernel machine approach applicable to the classication of graphs a couple of years ago, our eorts were mainly driven by the fact that kernel methods had led to impressive performance results on many data sets. It didn't take us long to appreciate the sheer elegance of how...

"Fletcher and Gardner have created a comprehensive resource that will be of interest not only to those working in the field of finance, but also to those using numerical methods in other fields such as engineering, physics, and actuarial mathematics. By showing how to combine the high-level elegance, accessibility, and flexibility of...

No one has ever described American democracy with more accurate insight or more profoundly than Alexis de Tocqueville. After meeting with Americans on extensive travels in the United States, and intense study of documents and authorities, he authored the landmark Democracy in America, publishing its two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Ever...

We make images to communicate. The ultimate measure of the quality of our images is how well they communicate information and ideas from the creator’s mind to the perceiver’s mind. The efficiency of this communication, and the quality of our image, depends on both what we want to say and to whom we intend to say it. I believe that...

Even before the poor thing had shipped, naysayers had their fun with it: the iPad’s nothing more than an oversized iPhone. But now that we’ve all gotten are fingers on these silver-and-black beauties, this much is clear: where the iPhone’s great for the little things in life—killing boredom, local lookups, and, you...

Using Rails 3, developers...