Regular rings were originally introduced by John von Neumann to clarify aspects of operator algebras ([33], [34], [9]). A continuous geometry is an indecomposable, continuous, complemented modular lattice that is not ?nite-dimensional ([8, page 155], [32, page V]). Von Neumann proved ([32, Theorem 14. 1, page 208], [8, page 162]): Every continuous geometry is isomorphic to the lattice of right ideals of some regular ring. The book of K. R. Goodearl ([14]) gives an extensive account of various types of regular rings and there exist several papers studying modules over regular rings ([27], [31], [15]). In abelian group theory the interest lay in determining those groups whose endomorphism rings were regular or had related properties ([11, Section 112], [29], [30], [12], [13], [24]). An interesting feature was introduced by Brown and McCoy ([4]) who showed that every ring contains a unique largest ideal, all of whose elements are regular elements of the ring. In all these studies it was clear that regularity was intimately related to direct sum decompositions. Ware and Zelmanowitz ([35], [37]) de?ned regularity in modules and studied the structure of regular modules. Nicholson ([26]) generalized the notion and theory of regular modules. In this purely algebraic monograph we study a generalization of regularity to the homomorphism group of two modules which was introduced by the ?rst author ([19]). Little background is needed and the text is accessible to students with an exposure to standard modern algebra. In the following, Risaringwith1,and A, M are right unital R-modules.

This book is a collection of invited papers and articles, many presented at the 2008 International Conference on Ring and Module Theory. The papers explore the latest in various areas of algebra, including ring theory, module theory and commutative algebra.

Written by one of the subject’s foremost experts, this book focuses on the central developments and modern methods of the advanced theory of abelian groups, while remaining accessible, as an introduction and reference, to the non-specialist. It provides a coherent source for results scattered throughout the research literature with lots of new proofs. The presentation highlights major trends that have radically changed the modern character of the subject, in particular, the use of homological methods in the structure theory of various classes of abelian groups, and the use of advanced set-theoretical methods in the study of un decidability problems. The treatment of the latter trend includes Shelah’s seminal work on the un decidability in ZFC of Whitehead’s Problem; while the treatment of the former trend includes an extensive (but non-exhaustive) study of p-groups, torsion-free groups, mixed groups and important classes of groups arising from ring theory. To prepare the reader to tackle these topics, the book reviews the fundamentals of abelian group theory and provides some background material from category theory, set theory, topology and homological algebra. An abundance of exercises are included to test the reader’s comprehension, and to explore noteworthy extensions and related sidelines of the main topics. A list of open problems and questions, in each chapter, invite the reader to take an active part in the subject’s further development.

The characterization of combinatorial or geometric structures in terms of their groups of automorphisms has attracted considerable interest in the last decades and is now commonly viewed as a natural generalization of Felix Klein’s Erlangen program(1872).Inaddition,especiallyfor?nitestructures,importantapplications to practical topics such as design theory, coding theory and cryptography have made the ?eld even more attractive. The subject matter of this research monograph is the study and class- cation of ?ag-transitive Steiner designs, that is, combinatorial t-(v,k,1) designs which admit a group of automorphisms acting transitively on incident point-block pairs. As a consequence of the classi?cation of the ?nite simple groups, it has been possible in recent years to characterize Steiner t-designs, mainly for t=2,adm- ting groups of automorphisms with su?ciently strong symmetry properties. For Steiner 2-designs, arguably the most general results have been the classi?cation of all point 2-transitive Steiner 2-designs in 1985 by W. M. Kantor, and the almost complete determination of all ?ag-transitive Steiner 2-designs announced in 1990 byF.Buekenhout,A.Delandtsheer,J.Doyen,P.B.Kleidman,M.W.Liebeck, and J. Saxl. However, despite the classi?cation of the ?nite simple groups, for Steiner t-designs witht> 2 most of the characterizations of these types have remained long-standing challenging problems. Speci?cally, the determination of all ?- transitive Steiner t-designs with 3? t? 6 has been of particular interest and object of research for more than 40 years.

Stringent industrial requirements of sophisticated performances and of circumstantial control for micro-devices or nanotechnology manufactures, and other types of machinery at multiple scales, can be satisfied often only by resort to or allowance for complex materials. The adjective 'complex' beckons to the fact that the substructure influences gross mechanical behaviour in a prominent way and interactions due to substructural changes are represented directly. The description of the mechanical behaviour of complex bodies proposes a wide class of challenging problems from macroscopic-to-nano-world. The collection of chapters composing this book aims to explore some aspects of these problems, proposing also new matter of discussion together with specific solutions. Contributors are Carlo Cercignani, Gianfranco Capriz, Pierre Degond, Antonio Fasano, Harley T. Johnson, Sukky Jun, Krishna Kannan, Wing Kam Liu, Alberto Mancini, Paolo Maria Mariano, Ingo Müller, Kumbakonan R. Rajagopal, Jan Jerzy Slawianowski. The book can be a useful tool for Scholars and PhD students addressing their research activity toward basic mathematical and physical problems accruing from the mechanics of materials.

This is a book about graph homomorphisms. Graph theory is now an established discipline but the study of graph homomorphisms has only recently begun to gain wide acceptance and interest. The subject gives a useful perspective in areas such as graph reconstruction, products, fractional and circular colourings, and has applications in complexity theory, artificial intelligence, telecommunication, and, most recently, statistical physics. Based on the authors' lecture notes for graduate courses, this book can be used as a textbook for a second course in graph theory at 4th year or master's level and has been used for courses at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), Charles University (Prague), ETH (Zurich), and UFRJ (Rio de Janeiro). The exercises vary in difficulty. The first few are usually intended to give the reader an opportunity to practice the concepts introduced in the chapter; the later ones explore related concepts, or even introduce new ones. For the harder exercises hints and references are provided. The authors are well known for their research in this area and the book will be invaluable to graduate students and researchers alike.

As its title suggests, this book is an introduction to three ideas and the connections between them. Before describing the content of the book in detail, we describe each concept briefly. More extensive introductory descriptions of each concept are in the introductions and notes to Chapters 2, 3 and 4. A topos is a special kind of category defined by axioms saying roughly that certain constructions one can make with sets can be done in the category. In that sense, a topos is a generalized set theory. However, it originated with Grothendieck and Giraud as an abstraction of the of the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space. Later, properties Lawvere and Tierney introduced a more general id~a which they called "elementary topos" (because their axioms did not quantify over sets), and they and other mathematicians developed the idea that a theory in the sense of mathematical logic can be regarded as a topos, perhaps after a process of completion. The concept of triple originated (under the name "standard construc in Godement's book on sheaf theory for the purpose of computing tions") sheaf cohomology. Then Peter Huber discovered that triples capture much of the information of adjoint pairs. Later Linton discovered that triples gave an equivalent approach to Lawverc's theory of equational theories (or rather the infinite generalizations of that theory). Finally, triples have turned out to be a very important tool for deriving various properties of toposes.

Vols. for 1963- include as pt. 2 of the Jan. issue: Medical subject headings.