Mathematics has been called the science of order. The subject is remarkably good for generalizing specific cases to create abstract theories. However, mathematics has little to say when faced with highly complex systems, where disorder reigns. This disorder can be found in pure mathematical arenas, such as the distribution of primes, the $3n+1$ conjecture, and class field theory. The purpose of this book is to provide examples--and rigorous proofs--of the complexity law: (1) discrete systems are either simple or they exhibit advanced pseudorandomness; (2) a priori probabilities often exist even when there is no intrinsic symmetry. Part of the difficulty in achieving this purpose is in trying to clarify these vague statements. The examples turn out to be fascinating instances of deep or mysterious results in number theory and combinatorics. This book considers randomness and complexity. The traditional approach to complexity--computational complexity theory--is to study very general complexity classes, such as P, NP and PSPACE. What Beck does is very different: he studies interesting concrete systems, which can give new insights into the mystery of complexity. The book is divided into three parts. Part A is mostly an essay on the big picture. Part B is partly new results and partly a survey of real game theory. Part C contains new results about graph games, supporting the main conjecture. To make it accessible to a wide audience, the book is mostly self-contained.

This book gives a comprehensive treatment of random phenomena and distribution results in diophantine approximation, with a particular emphasis on quadratic irrationals. It covers classical material on the subject as well as many new results developed by the author over the past decade. A range of ideas from other areas of mathematics are brought to bear with surprising connections to topics such as formulae for class numbers, special values of L-functions, and Dedekind sums. Care is taken to elaborate difficult proofs by motivating major steps and accompanying them with background explanations, enabling the reader to learn the theory and relevant techniques. Written by one of the acknowledged experts in the field, Probabilistic Diophantine Approximation is presented in a clear and informal style with sufficient detail to appeal to both advanced students and researchers in number theory.

This text is based on a lecture course given by the authors in the framework of Oberwolfach Seminars at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach in May, 2013. It is intended to serve as a thorough introduction to the rapidly developing field of positional games. This area constitutes an important branch of combinatorics, whose aim it is to systematically develop an extensive mathematical basis for a variety of two player perfect information games. These ranges from such popular games as Tic-Tac-Toe and Hex to purely abstract games played on graphs and hypergraphs. The subject of positional games is strongly related to several other branches of combinatorics such as Ramsey theory, extremal graph and set theory, and the probabilistic method. These notes cover a variety of topics in positional games, including both classical results and recent important developments. They are presented in an accessible way and are accompanied by exercises of varying difficulty, helping the reader to better understand the theory. The text will benefit both researchers and graduate students in combinatorics and adjacent fields.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 10th Latin American Symposium on Theoretical Informatics, LATIN 2012, held in Arequipa, Peru, in April 2012. The 55 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 153 submissions. The papers address a variety of topics in theoretical computer science with a certain focus on algorithms, automata theory and formal languages, coding theory and data compression, algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics, complexity theory, computational algebra, computational biology, computational geometry, computational number theory, cryptography, theoretical aspects of databases and information retrieval, data structures, networks, logic in computer science, machine learning, mathematical programming, parallel and distributed computing, pattern matching, quantum computing and random structures.

This is the first work on Discrepancy Theory to show the present variety of points of view and applications covering the areas Classical and Geometric Discrepancy Theory, Combinatorial Discrepancy Theory and Applications and Constructions. It consists of several chapters, written by experts in their respective fields and focusing on the different aspects of the theory. Discrepancy theory concerns the problem of replacing a continuous object with a discrete sampling and is currently located at the crossroads of number theory, combinatorics, Fourier analysis, algorithms and complexity, probability theory and numerical analysis. This book presents an invitation to researchers and students to explore the different methods and is meant to motivate interdisciplinary research.

The systematic use of Koszul cohomology computations in algebraic geometry can be traced back to the foundational work of Mark Green in the 1980s. Green connected classical results concerning the ideal of a projective variety with vanishing theorems for Koszul cohomology. Green and Lazarsfeld also stated two conjectures that relate the Koszul cohomology of algebraic curves with the existence of special divisors on the curve. These conjectures became an important guideline for future research. In the intervening years, there has been a growing interaction between Koszul cohomology and algebraic geometry. Green and Voisin applied Koszul cohomology to a number of Hodge-theoretic problems, with remarkable success. More recently, Voisin achieved a breakthrough by proving Green's conjecture for general curves; soon afterwards, the Green-Lazarsfeld conjecture for general curves was proved as well. This book is primarily concerned with applications of Koszul cohomology to algebraic geometry, with an emphasis on syzygies of complex projective curves. The authors' main goal is to present Voisin's proof of the generic Green conjecture, and subsequent refinements. They discuss the geometric aspects of the theory and a number of concrete applications of Koszul cohomology to problems in algebraic geometry, including applications to Hodge theory and to the geometry of the moduli space of curves.

Interpreting ""quantized coefficients"" as finite rank operators in a fixed Hilbert space allows the author to replace matrix computations with algebraic techniques of module theory and tensor products, thus achieving a more invariant approach to the subject.

Understanding, finding, or even deciding on the existence of real solutions to a system of equations is a difficult problem with many applications outside of mathematics. While it is hopeless to expect much in general, we know a surprising amount about these questions for systems which possess additional structure often coming from geometry. This book focuses on equations from toric varieties and Grassmannians. Not only is much known about these, but such equations are common in applications. There are three main themes: upper bounds on the number of real solutions, lower bounds on the number of real solutions, and geometric problems that can have all solutions be real. The book begins with an overview, giving background on real solutions to univariate polynomials and the geometry of sparse polynomial systems. The first half of the book concludes with fewnomial upper bounds and with lower bounds to sparse polynomial systems. The second half of the book begins by sampling some geometric problems for which all solutions can be real, before devoting the last five chapters to the Shapiro Conjecture, in which the relevant polynomial systems have only real solutions.

Conformal dimension measures the extent to which the Hausdorff dimension of a metric space can be lowered by quasisymmetric deformations. Introduced by Pansu in 1989, this concept has proved extremely fruitful in a diverse range of areas, including geometric function theory, conformal dynamics, and geometric group theory. This survey leads the reader from the definitions and basic theory through to active research applications in geometric function theory, Gromov hyperbolic geometry, and the dynamics of rational maps, amongst other areas. It reviews the theory of dimension in metric spaces and of deformations of metric spaces. It summarizes the basic tools for estimating conformal dimension and illustrates their application to concrete problems of independent interest. Numerous examples and proofs are provided. Working from basic definitions through to current research areas, this book can be used as a guide for graduate students interested in this field, or as a helpful survey for experts. Background needed for a potential reader of the book consists of a working knowledge of real and complex analysis on the level of first- and second-year graduate courses.

This book gives a unified, complete, and self-contained exposition of the main algebraic theorems of invariant theory for matrices in a characteristic free approach. More precisely, it contains the description of polynomial functions in several variables on the set of matrices with coefficients in an infinite field or even the ring of integers, invariant under simultaneous conjugation. Following Hermann Weyl's classical approach, the ring of invariants is described by formulating and proving (1) the first fundamental theorem that describes a set of generators in the ring of invariants, and (2) the second fundamental theorem that describes relations between these generators. The authors study both the case of matrices over a field of characteristic 0 and the case of matrices over a field of positive characteristic. While the case of characteristic 0 can be treated following a classical approach, the case of positive characteristic (developed by Donkin and Zubkov) is much harder. A presentation of this case requires the development of a collection of tools. These tools and their application to the study of invariants are exlained in an elementary, self-contained way in the book.