Few technical lerms have gained such rapid notoriety as the appela tion "NP-complete." In the short lime since its introduction in the early 1970's, this term has come to symbolize the abyss of inherent intractability that algorithm designers increasingly face as they seek to solve larger and more complex problems. A...

This book is meant as a handbook and resource guide for chemists (and other scientists) who either find themselves working alongside chemical engineers or who are undertaking chemical engineering-type projects and who wish to communicate with their colleagues and understand chemical engineering principles. The book has arisen out of...

"Modeling" has become one of the primary concerns in modern Software Engineering. The reason is simple: starting development processes from clear and succinct models has proven to foster not only quality but also productivity. With the advance of modeling there also came a desire for automatic code generation from models....

Maybe you've heard the story—or probably urban legend—about the university that didn't lay any grass or pour any concrete when it first opened, leaving the campus grounds as solid dirt. Then, as students began to traverse the campus from one class to the next, campus planners mapped the common paths they took, and then...

While books and journals of high quality have proliferated in discrete and compu- tational geometry during recent years, there has been to date no single reference work fully accessible to the nonspecialist as well as to the specialist, covering all the major aspects of both fields. The Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry...

This petroleum and natural gas engineering two-volume handbook is written in the spirit of the classic handbooks of other engineering disciplines. The two volumes reflect the importance of the industry its engineers serve (i.e., Standard and Poor's shows that the fuels sector is the largest single entity in the gross domestic...

Distributed with every copy of Python, the standard library contains hundreds of modules that provide tools for interacting with the operating system, interpreter, and Internet. All of them are tested and ready to be used to jump start the development of your applications. This book presents selected examples demonstrating how to use the most...

The second, revised edition of this book covers all aspects of non-uniform rational B-splines necessary to design geometry in a computer-aided environment. Basic B-spline features, curve and surface algorithms, and state-of-the-art geometry tools are all discussed. Detailed code for design algorithms and computational tricks are covered, too,...

I have been extremely fortunate. I have a wonderful wife and two wonderful grown-up children, and I have had all but thirty years working for Shell, which provided an environment...

This is an unconventional book for an unconventional reader. It is intended for those professionals who, in addition to their specialized knowledge, would like to get a handle on life so they may put their special text into its proper context. It speaks to those thinkers and practitioners who have come to realize that learning to be...

Almost everyone has had the need at one point or another to keep a list of things that need to be done. Many people pick up a piece of paper every day and write down the things they want to attempt to accomplish that day. Such lists drive many people’s lives. Some people keep them in their heads, but as we get older, we need to...

Anticipatory optimization for dynamic decision making relies on a number of different scientific disciplines. On a general level, the foundations of the field may be localized at the intersection of operations research, computer science and decision theory. Closer inspection reveals the important role of branches such as simulation,...