The unnamed narrator of "Metaphysica Morum" seeks suicide, yet delays until he can subvert the optimism of his fugitive therapist. Equally anonymous, the young narrator of "The Small People" finds a growing horror in the encroachment of toy-like beings that bring an unsettling enlightenment about the shabbiness of daily life and the true nature of his parents

The intention of this book is to introduce students to active areas of research in mathematical physics in a rather direct way minimizing the use of abstract mathematics. The main features are geometric methods in spectral analysis, exponential decay of eigenfunctions, semi-classical analysis of bound state problems, and semi-classical analysis of resonance. A new geometric point of view along with new techniques are brought out in this book which have both been discovered within the past decade. This book is designed to be used as a textbook, unlike the competitors which are either too fundamental in their approach or are too abstract in nature to be considered as texts. The authors' text fills a gap in the marketplace.

Forthcoming

Theater’s materiality and reliance on human actors has traditionally put it at odds with modernist principles of aesthetic autonomy and depersonalization. Spectral Characters argues that modern dramatists in fact emphasized the extent to which humans are fictional, made and changed by costumes, settings, props, and spoken dialogue. Examining work by Ibsen, Wilde, Strindberg, Genet, Kopit, and Beckett, the book takes up the apparent deadness of characters whose selves are made of other people, whose thoughts become exteriorized communication technologies, and whose bodies merge with walls and furniture. The ghostly, vampiric, and telepathic qualities of these characters, Sarah Balkin argues, mark a new relationship between the material and the imaginary in modern theater. By considering characters whose bodies respond to language, whose attempts to realize their individuality collapse into inanimacy, and who sometimes don’t appear at all, the book posits a new genealogy of modernist drama that emphasizes its continuities with nineteenth-century melodrama and realism.

Along with finite differences and finite elements, spectral methods are one of the three main methodologies for solving partial differential equations on computers. This book provides a detailed presentation of basic spectral algorithms, as well as a systematical presentation of basic convergence theory and error analysis for spectral methods. Readers of this book will be exposed to a unified framework for designing and analyzing spectral algorithms for a variety of problems, including in particular high-order differential equations and problems in unbounded domains. The book contains a large number of figures which are designed to illustrate various concepts stressed in the book. A set of basic matlab codes has been made available online to help the readers to develop their own spectral codes for their specific applications.

This book presents the basic tools of modern analysis within the context of the fundamental problem of operator theory: to calculate spectra of specific operators on infinite dimensional spaces, especially operators on Hilbert spaces. The tools are diverse, and they provide the basis for more refined methods that allow one to approach problems that go well beyond the computation of spectra: the mathematical foundations of quantum physics, noncommutative K-theory, and the classification of simple C*-algebras being three areas of current research activity which require mastery of the material presented here.

This volume surveys the spectral properties of the spin Dirac operator. After a brief introduction to spin geometry, it presents the main known estimates for Dirac eigenvalues on compact manifolds with or without boundaries.