Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in Ó Gráda's new work, the advent of the blight phytophthora infestans transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years. Central to Irish and British history, European demography, the world history of famines, and the story of American immigration, the Great Irish Famine is presented here from a variety of new perspectives. Moving away from the traditional narrative historical approach to the catastrophe, Ó Gráda concentrates instead on fresh insights available through interdisciplinary and comparative methods. He highlights several economic and sociological features of the famine previously neglected in the literature, such as the part played by traders and markets, by medical science, and by migration. Other topics include how the Irish climate, usually hospitable to the potato, exacerbated the failure of the crops in 1845-1847, and the controversial issue of Britain's failure to provide adequate relief to the dying Irish. Ó Gráda also examines the impact on urban Dublin of what was mainly a rural disaster and offers a critical analysis of the famine as represented in folk memory and tradition. The broad scope of this book is matched by its remarkable range of sources, published and archival. The book will be the starting point for all future research into the Irish famine.

This entertaining book presents a collection of 180 famous mathematical puzzles and intriguing elementary problems that great mathematicians have posed, discussed, and/or solved. The selected problems do not require advanced mathematics, making this book accessible to a variety of readers. Mathematical recreations offer a rich playground for both amateur and professional mathematicians. Believing that creative stimuli and aesthetic considerations are closely related, great mathematicians from ancient times to the present have always taken an interest in puzzles and diversions. The goal of this book is to show that famous mathematicians have all communicated brilliant ideas, methodological approaches, and absolute genius in mathematical thoughts by using recreational mathematics as a framework. Concise biographies of many mathematicians mentioned in the text are also included. The majority of the mathematical problems presented in this book originated in number theory, graph theory, optimization, and probability. Others are based on combinatorial and chess problems, while still others are geometrical and arithmetical puzzles. This book is intended to be both entertaining as well as an introduction to various intriguing mathematical topics and ideas. Certainly, many stories and famous puzzles can be very useful to prepare classroom lectures, to inspire and amuse students, and to instill affection for mathematics.

During 1945 Andre de Dienes (1913-1985) photographed a young model named Norma Jean. His subsequent five-year working relationship with the woman who became Marilyn Monroe is the beginning of de Dienes's career in Hollywood. He photographed celebrities, and his documentary work took him from Muscle Beach in Venice to sharecroppers working the cotton fields of the deep South. But his first love in photography was the female nude, and in his lifetime he photographed and published thousands of these pictures. Selected from the archives of his estate are seventy-five of the finest images printed by the artist. Reproduced actual size these prints are a time capsule of half-century old interpretations of female beauty.

The spontaneous formation of well organized structures out of germs or even out of chaos is one of the most fascinating phenomena and most challenging problems scientists are confronted with. Such phenomena are an experience of our daily life when we observe the growth of plants and animals. Thinking of much larger time scales, scientists are led into the problems of evolution, and, ultimately, of the origin of living matter. When we try to explain or understand in some sense these extremely complex biological phenomena it is a natural question, whether pro cesses of self-organization may be found in much simpler systems of the un animated world. In recent years it has become more and more evident that there exist numerous examples in physical and chemical systems where well organized spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal structures arise out of chaotic states. Furthermore, as in living of these systems can be maintained only by a flux of organisms, the functioning energy (and matter) through them. In contrast to man-made machines, which are to exhibit special structures and functionings, these structures develop spon devised It came as a surprise to many scientists that taneously-they are self-organizing. numerous such systems show striking similarities in their behavior when passing from the disordered to the ordered state. This strongly indicates that the function of such systems obeys the same basic principles. In our book we wish to explain ing such basic principles and underlying conceptions and to present the mathematical tools to cope with them.