Development of Iwasawa Theory: The Centennial of K. Iwasawa's Birth (86)

This monograph is the first book-length exposition of ranked set sampling. But, the subject matter is by no means new. The original notion of ranked set sampling, though not the technical term, was proposed by McIntyre in 1952. It was buried in the literature for quite a while. Its value was only re-discovered in recent years because of its cost-effective nature. Now, ranked set sampling has attracted practical interest in application areas such as agriculture, forestry, ecological and environmental science, and medical studies etc .. The theoretical foundations of the method has also been developed considerably, particularly during the last 15 years or so. A systematic exposition of the subject becomes necessary. This book covers every development of RSS since the birth of the original idea. Statistical inferences based on RSS are investigated from the originally intended estimation of a population mean to many more complicated pro­ cedures such as the inferences on smooth-function-of-means, quantiles and density functions, the distribution-free tests and regression analyses. Various variants of the original RSS scheme are explored, including RSS with imper­ fect judgment ranking or ranking by concomitant variables, adaptive RSS, multi-layer RSS and a variety of unbalanced RSS with certain optimalities.

Ralf Dahrendorf (1929 to 2009) has worked in sociology, political practice and political philosophy, and is associated with significant impulses in role theory and conflict theory. This book presents the first synthesis of his extensive oeuvre in English.

There are many excellent books on quantum theory from which one can learn to compute energy levels, transition rates, cross sections, etc. The theoretical rules given in these books are routinely used by physicists to compute observable quantities. Their predictions can then be compared with experimental data. There is no fundamental disagreement among physicists on how to use the theory for these practical purposes. However, there are profound differences in their opinions on the ontological meaning of quantum theory. The purpose of this book is to clarify the conceptual meaning of quantum theory, and to explain some of the mathematical methods which it utilizes.

‘Gravity, a Geometrical Course’ presents general relativity (GR) in a systematic and exhaustive way, covering three aspects that are homogenized into a single texture: i) the mathematical, geometrical foundations, exposed in a self consistent contemporary formalism, ii) the main physical, astrophysical and cosmological applications, updated to the issues of contemporary research and observations, with glimpses on supergravity and superstring theory, iii) the historical development of scientific ideas underlying both the birth of general relativity and its subsequent evolution. The book is divided in two volumes.