Immersive environments such as virtual reality technology makes possible can respond to their audiences, so that each person's experience of the environment is unique. This volume brings together 11 essays along with artists' projects produced at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada to explore issues raised by the creation of virtual environments. The essays approach the social and cultural implications of cyberspace from the perspective of cultural studies, communications, art history, art criticism, English, and women's studies; while artists who created nine virtual worlds at the Banff Centre discuss what they have tried to accomplish in both theoretical and technical terms. With 64 illustrations, including 18 color plates. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The following gives a development of Arakelov theory general enough to handle not only regular arithmetic surfaces but also a large class of arithmetic surfaces whose generic fiber has singularities. This development culminates in an arithmetic Riemann-Roch theorem for such arithmetic surfaces. The first part of the memoir gives a treatment of Deligne's functorial intersection theory, and the second develops a class of intersection functions for singular curves which behaves analogously to the canonical Green's functions introduced by Arakelov for smooth curves.

For each infinite cardinal [lowercase Greek]Kappa, we give a structural characterization of the graphs with no [italic capital]K[subscript lowercase Greek]Kappa minor. We also give such a characterization of the graphs with no "half-grid" minor.

Numerically speaking, continuous time dynamical systems do not exist. Rather, a discretized version is studied and interpreted in analogy to the continuous time dynamical system. Over fixed finite time intervals, this analogy is quite close and well understood in terms of discretization errors and sophisticated discretization schemes. Over large or infinite time intervals, this analogy is not so clear, because discretization errors tend to accumulate exponentially with time. In this paper, we specifically investigate the correspondence between continuous and discrete time dynamical systems for homoclinic orbits. By definition, these are orbits which tend to the same stationary point for both large positive and large negative times.

We undertake a systematic study of cyclic phenomena for composition operators. Our work shows that composition operators exhibit strikingly diverse types of cyclic behavior, and it connects this behavior with classical problems involving complex polynomial approximation and analytic functional equations.

In this power we show how to compute the parameter space [italic capital]X for the versal deformation of an isolated singularity ([italic capital]V, 0) under the assumptions [italic]dim [italic capital]V [greater than or equal to symbol] 4, depth {0} [italic capital]V [greater than or equal to symbol] 3, from the CR-structure on a link [italic capital]M of the singularity. We do this by showing that the space [italic capital]X is isomorphic to the space (denoted here by [script capital]K[subscript italic capital]M) associated to [italic capital]M by Kuranishi in 1977. In fact we produce isomorphisms of the associated complete local rings by producing quasi-isomorphisms of the controlling differential graded Lie algebras for the corresponding formal deformation theories.

This memoir initiates a model theory-based study of the numerical radius norm. Guided by the abstract model theory of Jim Agler, the authors propose a decomposition for operators that is particularly useful in understanding their properties with respect to the numerical radius norm. Of the topics amenable to investigation with these tools, the following are presented: a complete description of the linear extreme points of the non-matrix (numerical radius) unit ball; several equivalent characterizations of matricial extremals in the unit ball, that is, those members which do not allow a nontrivial extension remaining in the unit ball; and applications to numerical ranges of matrices, including a complete parameterization of all matrices whose numerical ranges are closed disks.

It is now well know that the measure algebra [script capital]M([italic capital]G) of a locally compact group can be regarded as a subalgebra of the operator algebra [italic capital]B([italic capital]B([italic capital]L2([italic capital]G))) of the operator algebra [italic capital]B([italic capital]L2([italic capital]G)) of the Hilbert space [italic capital]L2([italic capital]G). We study the situation in hypergroups and find that, in general, the analogous map for them is neither an isometry nor a homomorphism. However, it is completely positive and completely bounded in certain ways. This work presents the related general theory and special examples.

In this book, the authors treat the full Hodge theory for the de Rham complex when calculated in the Sobolev topology rather than in the $L2$ topology. The use of the Sobolev topology strikingly alters the problem from the classical setup and gives rise to a new class of elliptic boundary value problems. The study takes place on both the upper half space and on a smoothly bounded domain. It features: a good introduction to elliptic theory, pseudo-differential operators, and boundary value problems; theorems completely explained and proved; and new geometric tools for differential analysis on domains and manifolds.

The theory of simple algebraic groups is important in many areas of mathematics. The authors of this book investigate the subgroups of certain types of simple algebraic groups and obtain a complete description of all those subgroups which are themselves simple. This description is particularly useful in understanding centralizers of subgroups and restrictions of representations.