A mathematical puzzle book that involves labeling points or edges on three types of graphs: (1) polycubes, which consist of cubes attached face-to-face, (2) polyhexes, which consist of regular hexagons joined edge to edge, and (3) triangulations, which consist of triangles attached edge to edge. For a polycube with n points, the puzzle consists of labeling each vertex with the full set of integers (mod n), (Zn) so that the four labels belonging to each face of every component cube have the same sum. For a polyhex with n points, the vertices are to be labeled with elements from Zn so that the six labels assigned to each component hexagon have the same sum. For puzzles involving triangulation, the edges, instead of the vertices, are to be labeled with elements of Zn. To solve the puzzle, a labeling must be found so that the edges of each component triangle have the same sum. Unlike sudoku, these puzzles have many solutions; the solutions provided in the back of the book are included just to show that a solution exists. Readers are encouraged to create and solve their own puzzles in any of the three genres. Questions of mathematical interest are provided throughout.

A mathematical puzzle book which involves labeling vertices of a plane graph with elements from an abelian group G such that the labels applied to the bounding vertices of each region have the same sum in G. The plane graphs are those formed by the edges and vertices of various types of parallelograms fitted together edge to edge. We call these polyparallelograms. The polyparallelogram puzzles are organized into the following categories according to the types of parallelograms involved: (i) polysquares (or polyominoes; (ii) 60/120 rhombs; (iii) 36/144 and 72/108 rhombs (Penrose rhombs); (iv) various lattice parallelograms. The reader is introduced to the theory of polyparallelogram tilings of polygons, and challenged with problems and research questions at the end of each Chapter. All that is required of the elementary theory of graphs and abelian groups is included in the text. Also included are a variety of pure tiling problems involving nonparallelogram lattice quadrilaterals. “Polyparallelogram Puzzles and Tiling Problems” is a sequel to “Polycubes, Triangulations and Polyhexes over Zn” and features a similar type of puzzle but is more engaging mathematically.

This book introduces computational proximity (CP) as an algorithmic approach to finding nonempty sets of points that are either close to each other or far apart. Typically in computational proximity, the book starts with some form of proximity space (topological space equipped with a proximity relation) that has an inherent geometry. In CP, two types of near sets are considered, namely, spatially near sets and descriptivelynear sets. It is shown that connectedness, boundedness, mesh nerves, convexity, shapes and shape theory are principal topics in the study of nearness and separation of physical aswell as abstract sets. CP has a hefty visual content. Applications of CP in computer vision, multimedia, brain activity, biology, social networks, and cosmology are included. The book has been derived from the lectures of the author in a graduate course on the topology of digital images taught over the past several years. Many of the students have provided important insights and valuable suggestions. The topics in this monograph introduce many forms of proximities with a computational flavour (especially, what has become known as the strong contact relation), many nuances of topological spaces, and point-free geometry.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis, held December 1–3, 2004, in Auckland, New Zealand. Prior meetings took place in Paris (France, 1991), Ube (Japan, 1992), Washington DC (USA, 1994), Lyon (France, 1995), Hiroshima (Japan, 1997), Madras (India, 1999), Caen (France, 2000), Philadelphia (USA, 2001), and - lermo (Italy, 2003). For this workshop we received 86 submitted papers from 23 countries. Each paper was evaluated by at least two independent referees. We selected 55 papers for the conference. Three invited lectures by Vladimir Kovalevsky (Berlin), Akira Nakamura (Hiroshima), and Maurice Nivat (Paris) completed the program. Conference papers are presented in this volume under the following topical part titles: discrete tomography (3 papers), combinatorics and computational models (6), combinatorial algorithms (6), combinatorial mathematics (4), d- ital topology (7), digital geometry (7), approximation of digital sets by curves and surfaces (5), algebraic approaches (5), fuzzy image analysis (2), image s- mentation (6), and matching and recognition (7). These subjects are dealt with in the context of digital image analysis or computer vision.

The principal aim of this book is to introduce topology and its many applications viewed within a framework that includes a consideration of compactness, completeness, continuity, filters, function spaces, grills, clusters and bunches, hyperspace topologies, initial and final structures, metric spaces, metrization, nets, proximal continuity, proximity spaces, separation axioms, and uniform spaces.This book provides a complete framework for the study of topology with a variety of applications in science and engineering that include camouflage filters, classification, digital image processing, forgery detection, Hausdorff raster spaces, image analysis, microscopy, paleontology, pattern recognition, population dynamics, stem cell biology, topological psychology, and visual merchandising.It is the first complete presentation on topology with applications considered in the context of proximity spaces, and the nearness and remoteness of sets of objects. A novel feature throughout this book is the use of near and far, discovered by F Riesz over 100 years ago. In addition, it is the first time that this form of topology is presented in the context of a number of new applications.

This book carries forward recent work on visual patterns and structures in digital images and introduces a near set-based a topology of digital images. Visual patterns arise naturally in digital images viewed as sets of non-abstract points endowed with some form of proximity (nearness) relation. Proximity relations make it possible to construct uniform topologies on the sets of points that constitute a digital image. In keeping with an interest in gaining an understanding of digital images themselves as a rich source of patterns, this book introduces the basics of digital images from a computer vision perspective. In parallel with a computer vision perspective on digital images, this book also introduces the basics of proximity spaces. Not only the traditional view of spatial proximity relations but also the more recent descriptive proximity relations are considered. The beauty of the descriptive proximity approach is that it is possible to discover visual set patterns among sets that are non-overlapping and non-adjacent spatially. By combining the spatial proximity and descriptive proximity approaches, the search for salient visual patterns in digital images is enriched, deepened and broadened. A generous provision of Matlab and Mathematica scripts are used in this book to lay bare the fabric and essential features of digital images for those who are interested in finding visual patterns in images. The combination of computer vision techniques and topological methods lead to a deep understanding of images.