This book contains lectures on theta functions written by experts well known for excellence in exposition. The lectures represent the content of four courses given at the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques in Montreal during the academic year 1991-1992, which was devoted to the study of automorphic forms. Aimed at graduate students, the book synthesizes the classical and modern points of view in theta functions, concentrating on connections to number theory and representation theory. An excellent introduction to this important subject of current research, this book is suitable as a text in advanced graduate courses.

Originally published: New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

In a future starscape where the children of man have succumbed to humanity's long-forgotten vices, THETA is a story of a dark, twisting dance of intrigue, love and loss among the stars. Stuck in a dramatic struggle between death and life, a young dancer must choose between his enigmatic past and an uncertain future. Unable to let go of what he was, unable to face what he is, beset on all sides by forces he doesn't understand, he's on a collision course with destiny...and his time is running out. For Jale Bercammon, on the other hand, life is comfortable, stable, and slipping on by. Every day is routine, and she’s become an expert at maintaining routine. ... And then she crosses paths with Theta. Reeled in by the enigmatic and sinister Knoskali to explain his disappearance, she soon finds herself stumbling along a dangerous path that will take all of her resolve and ingenuity to survive.

Before she died in 2007, Tanya Reinhart had gone a long way towards developing the Theta System, a theory in which formal features defining the thematic relations of verbs are encoded in the lexicon, enabling an interface between the lexical component and the computational system/syntax, directly, and the Inference system, indirectly. This book considers the recent results and evaluations of Tanya Reinhart's research in both theoretical and experimental domains. After a comprehensive presentation of the framework by the editors, distinguished linguists from all over the world examine the underpinning of the Theta System, compare the framework to alternative approaches, and consider its implications for the architecture of grammar. In addition, they consider and exemplify the applications of the system and offer improvements and extensions. The book is an important contribution to linguistic research. It engages in the key dialogue between competing lexicalist and syntactic approaches to lexico-semantic problems and does so in the context of an impressive array of new empirical data ranging from Germanic, Romance, and Slavic to Ugro-Finnish, and Semitic languages.