Two charming, over-anxious, germ-phobic friends, Isaac and Greg take a road trip from Boston to Philadelphia. They are both obsessed with Marcel Duchamp, his art and his ideas, and thus the destination has to be the largest collection of Duchamp in the world, The Philadelphia Art Museum, the actual place "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" was to be delivered when it was cracked and broken in shipment. The piece is sometimes known as The Large Glass, and today it sits in the middle of a large gallery proudly displayed in its broken state which Duchamp repaired and then certified had been his intention all along.The two men are driven in a rented disinfected Winnebago by Kelly, a beautiful art scholar who smells like a mixture of lemons and fresh sawdust. They intend to pick up an ancient chocolate grinder, an exact working sculptural copy of one used in a Duchamp painting. Isaac intends to grind his own pure chocolate, which will prevent the build-up or arterial plaque, because his mother died of a stroke. Every action has its own suitable reaction, and then some. Isaac hopes eventually to overcome his devotion to his many obsessions and to re-enter the world, evidently his version of the real world. He is not an unreliable narrator, he is a hyper-reliable narrator, consumed by his own attention and thrilled with the connections he sees everywhere all at once. Of course when he finally gets to the museum he must dress-up as a woman to visit the collection.

    Includes many examples and figures. GENERAL TOPOLOGY. Set Theory and Logic. Topological Spaces and Continuous Functions. Connectedness and Compactness. Countability and Separation Axioms. The Tychonoff Theorem. Metrization Theorems and paracompactness. Complete Metric Spaces and Function Spaces. Baire Spaces and Dimension Theory. ALGEBRAIC TOPOLOGY. The Fundamental Group. Separation Theorems. The Seifert-van Kampen Theorem. Classification of Surfaces. Classification of Covering Spaces. Applications to Group Theory. For anyone needing a basic, thorough, introduction to general and algebraic topology and its applications.

    Includes expert coverage of new topics: Turbocodes, Turboequalization, Antenna Arrays, Digital Cellular Systems, and Iterative Detection. Convenient, sequential organization begins with a look at the historyo and classification of channel models and builds from there.

    Inside PFTB (Proofs from The Book) is indeed a glimpse of mathematical heaven, where clever insights and beautiful ideas combine in astonishing and glorious ways. There is vast wealth within its pages, one gem after another. Some of the proofs are classics, but many are new and brilliant proofs of classical results. ...Aigner and Ziegler... write: ..". all we offer is the examples that we have selected, hoping that our readers will share our enthusiasm about brilliant ideas, clever insights and wonderful observations." I do. ... " Notices of the AMS, August 1999..". the style is clear and entertaining, the level is close to elementary ... and the proofs are brilliant. ..." LMS Newsletter, January 1999This third edition offers two new chapters, on partition identities, and on card shuffling. Three proofs of Euler's most famous infinite series appear in a separate chapter. There is also a number of other improvements, such as an exciting new way to "enumerate the rationals."

    This book will teach you the basic poker mathematics you need to know in order to improve and outplay your opponents, and focuses on foundational poker mathematics - the ones you’ll use day in and day out at the poker table; and probably the ones your opponents neglect.

    Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio. Even as he initiates us into the mysteries of real numbers, functions, and limits, Berlinski explores the furthest implications of his subject, revealing how the calculus reconciles the precision of numbers with the fluidity of the changing universe. "An odd and tantalizing book by a writer who takes immense pleasure in this great mathematical tool, and tries to create it in others."--New York Times Book Review