Books published by Princeton University Press

Hailed as one of the greatest mathematical results of the twentieth century, the recent proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles brought to public attention the enigmatic problem-solver Pierre de Fermat, who centuries ago stated his famous conjecture in a margin of a book, writing that he did not have enough room to show his "e;truly marvelous demonstration."e; Along with formulating this proposition--xn+yn=zn has no rational solution for n > 2--Fermat, an inventor of analytic geometry, also laid the foundations of differential and integral calculus, established, together with Pascal, the conceptual guidelines of the theory of probability, and created modern number theory. In one of the first full-length investigations of Fermat's life and work, Michael Sean Mahoney provides rare insight into the mathematical genius of a hobbyist who never sought to publish his work, yet who ranked with his contemporaries Pascal and Descartes in shaping the course of modern mathematics.</p>

Just one generation ago, lawyers dominated Mexico's political elite, and Mexican economists were a relatively powerless group of mostly leftist nationalists. Today, in contrast, the country is famous, or perhaps infamous, for being run by American-trained neoclassical economists. In 1993, the Economist suggested that Mexico had the most economically literate government in the world--a trend that has continued since Mexico's transition to multi-party democracy. To the accompanying fanfare of U.S. politicians and foreign investors, these technocrats embarked on the ambitious program of privatization, deregulation, budget-cutting, and opening to free trade--all in keeping with the prescriptions of mainstream American economics. This book chronicles the evolution of economic expertise in Mexico over the course of the twentieth century, showing how internationally credentialed experts came to set the agenda for the Mexican economics profession and to dominate Mexican economic policymaking. It also reveals how the familiar language of Mexico's new experts overlays a professional structure that is still alien to most American economists. Sarah Babb mines diverse sources--including Mexican undergraduate theses, historical documents, and personal interviews--to address issues relevant not only to Latin American studies, but also to the sociology of professions, political sociology, economic sociology, and neoinstitutionalist sociology. She demonstrates with skill how peculiarly national circumstances shape what economic experts think and do. At the same time, Babb shows how globalization can erode national systems of economic expertise in developing countries, creating a new class of ''global experts.''

On June 11, 1485, in the pilgrimage town of Guadalupe, the Holy Office of the Inquisition executed Alonso de Paredes--a converted Jew who posed an economic and political threat to the town's powerful friars--as a heretic. Wedding engrossing narratives of Paredes and other figures with astute historical analysis, this finely wrought study reconsiders the relationship between religious identity and political authority in late-Medieval and early-modern Spain. Gretchen Starr-LeBeau concentrates on the Inquisition's handling of conversos (converted Jews and their descendants) in Guadalupe, taking religious identity to be a complex phenomenon that was constantly re-imagined and reconstructed in light of changing personal circumstances and larger events. She demonstrates that the Inquisition reified the ambiguous religious identities of conversos by defining them as devout or (more often) heretical. And she argues that political figures used this definitional power of the Inquisition to control local populations and to increase their own authority. In the Shadow of the Virgin is unique in pointing out that the power of the Inquisition came from the collective participation of witnesses, accusers, and even sometimes its victims. For the first time, it draws the connection between the malleability of religious identity and the increase in early modern political authority. It shows that, from the earliest days of the modern Spanish Inquisition, the Inquisition reflected the political struggles and collective religious and cultural anxieties of those who were drawn into participating in it.

This is a comprehensive and detailed account of the economichistory of Puerto Rico from the period of Spanish colonial dominationto the present. Interweaving findings of the "e;new"e; Puerto Ricanhistoriography with those of earlier historical studies, and usingthe most recent theoretical concepts to interpret them, James Dietzexamines the complex manner in which productive and class relationswithin Puerto Rico have interacted with changes in its placein the world economy.Besides including aggregate data on Puerto Rico's economy, theauthor offers valuable information on workers' living conditionsand women workers, plus new interpretations of development sinceOperation Bootstrap. His evaluation of the island's export-orientedeconomy has implications for many other developing countries.

Most analysts of corporations and industries adopt the focal perspective of a single prototypical organization. Many analysts also study corporations primarily in terms of their internal organizational structures or as complex systems of financial contracts. Glenn Carroll and Michael Hannan bring fresh insight to our understanding of corporations and the industries they comprise by looking beyond prototypical structures to focus on the range and diversity of organizations in their social and economic setting. The result is a rich rendering of analysis that portrays whole populations and communities of corporations. The Demography of Corporations and Industries is the first book to present the demographic approach to organizational studies in its entirety. It examines the theory, models, methods, and data used in corporate demographic research. Carroll and Hannan explore the processes by which corporate populations change over time, including organizational founding, growth, decline, structural transformation, and mortality. They review and synthesize the major theoretical mechanisms of corporate demography, ranging from aging and size dependence to population segregation and density dependence. The book also explores some selected implications of corporate demography for public policy, including employment and regulation. In this path-breaking book, Carroll and Hannan demonstrate why demographic research on corporations is important; describe how to conduct demographic research; specify fruitful areas of future research; and suggest how the demographic perspective can enrich the public discussion of issues surrounding the corporation in our constantly evolving industrial society. All researchers and analysts with an interest in this topic will find The Demography of Corporations and Industries an invaluable resource.

Market societies have created more wealth, and more opportunities for more people, than any other system of social organization in history. Yet we still have a rudimentary understanding of how markets themselves are social constructions that require extensive institutional support. This groundbreaking work seeks to fill this gap, to make sense of modern capitalism by developing a sociological theory of market institutions. Addressing the unruly dynamism that capitalism brings with it, leading sociologist Neil Fligstein argues that the basic drift of any one market and its actors, even allowing for competition, is toward stabilization. The Architecture of Markets represents a major and timely step beyond recent, largely empirical studies that oppose the neoclassical model of perfect competition but provide sparse theory toward a coherent economic sociology. Fligstein offers this theory. With it he interprets not just globalization and the information economy, but developments more specific to American capitalism in the past two decades--among them, the 1980s merger movement. He makes new inroads into the ''theory of fields,'' which links the formation of markets and firms to the problems of stability. His political-cultural approach explains why governments remain crucial to markets and why so many national variations of capitalism endure. States help make stable markets possible by, for example, establishing the rule of law and adjudicating the class struggle. State-building and market-building go hand in hand. Fligstein shows that market actors depend mightily upon governments and the members of society for the social conditions that produce wealth. He demonstrates that systems favoring more social justice and redistribution can yield stable markets and economic growth as readily as less egalitarian systems. This book will surely join the classics on capitalism. Economists, sociologists, policymakers, and all those interested in what makes markets function as they do will read it for many years to come.

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed.

The first book to explore how African-American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries illuminates the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power.

The quotable Ai WeiweiThis collection of quotes demonstrates the elegant simplicity of Ai Weiwei's thoughts on key aspects of his art, politics, and life. A master at communicating powerful ideas in astonishingly few words, Ai Weiwei is known for his innovative use of social media to disseminate his views. The short quotations presented here have been carefully selected from articles, tweets, and interviews given by this acclaimed Chinese artist and activist. The book is organized into six categories: freedom of expression; art and activism; government, power, and moral choices; the digital world; history, the historical moment, and the future; and personal reflections.Together, these quotes span some of the most revealing moments of Ai Weiwei's eventful career-from his risky investigation into student deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to his arbitrary arrest in 2011-providing a window into the mind of one of the world's most electrifying and courageous contemporary artists.Select Quotes from the Book:On Freedom of Expression"e;Say what you need to say plainly, and then take responsibility for it."e;"e;A small act is worth a million thoughts."e;"e;Liberty is about our rights to question everything."e;On Art and Activism"e;Everything is art. Everything is politics."e;"e;The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay."e;"e;Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don't feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy."e;On Government, Power, and Making Moral Choice"e;Once you've tasted freedom, it stays in your heart and no one can take it. Then, you can be more powerful than a whole country."e;"e;I feel powerless all the time, but I regain my energy by making a very small difference that won't cost me much."e;"e;Tips on surviving the regime: Respect yourself and speak for others. Do one small thing every day to prove the existence of justice."e;On the Digital World"e;Only with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what's on his mind. A fairy tale has come true."e;"e;The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It's as simple as that."e;"e;The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China."e;On History, the Historical Moment, and the Future"e;If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future."e;"e;We need to get out of the old language."e;"e;The world is a sphere, there is no East or West."e;Personal Reflection"e;I've never planned any part of my career-except being an artist. And I was pushed into that corner because I thought being an artist was the only way to have a little freedom."e;"e;Anyone fighting for freedom does not want to totally lose their freedom."e;"e;Expressing oneself is like a drug. I'm so addicted to it."e;

Flight Dynamics takes a new approach to the science and mathematics of aircraft flight, unifying principles of aeronautics with contemporary systems analysis. While presenting traditional material that is critical to understanding aircraft motions, it does so in the context of modern computational tools and multivariable methods. Robert Stengel devotes particular attention to models and techniques that are appropriate for analysis, simulation, evaluation of flying qualities, and control system design. He establishes bridges to classical analysis and results, and explores new territory that was treated only inferentially in earlier books. This book combines a highly accessible style of presentation with contents that will appeal to graduate students and to professionals already familiar with basic flight dynamics. Dynamic analysis has changed dramatically in recent decades, with the introduction of powerful personal computers and scientific programming languages. Analysis programs have become so pervasive that it can be assumed that all students and practicing engineers working on aircraft flight dynamics have access to them. Therefore, this book presents the principles, derivations, and equations of flight dynamics with frequent reference to MATLAB functions and examples. By using common notation and not assuming a strong background in aeronautics, Flight Dynamics will engage a wide variety of readers. Introductions to aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, flying qualities, flight control, and the atmospheric and gravitational environment accompany the development of the aircraft's dynamic equations.

Richard J. A. Talbert examines the composition, procedure, and functions of the Roman senate during the Principate (30 B.C.-A.D. 238). Although it is of central importance to the period, this great council has not previously received such scholarly treatment. Offering a fresh approach to major ancient authors (Pliny and Tacitus in particular), the book also draws on inscriptions and legal writers never before fully exploited for the study of the senate.

Hans Baron was one of the many great German emigre scholars whose work Princeton brought into the Anglo-American world. His Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance has provoked more discussion and inspired more research than any other twentieth-century study of the Italian Renaissance.Baron's book was the first historical synthesis of politics and humanism at that momentous critical juncture when Italy passed from medievalism to the thought of the Renaissance. Baron, unlike his peers, married culture and politics; he contended that to truly understand the Renaissance one must understand the rise of humanism within the political context of the day. This marked a significant departure for the field and one that changed the direction of Renaissance studies. Moreover, Baron's book was one of the first major attempts of any sort to ground intellectual history in a fully realized historical context and thus stands at the very origins of the interdisciplinary approach that is now the core of Renaissance studies.Baron's analysis of the forces that changed life and thought in fifteenth-century Italy was widely reviewed domestically and internationally, and scholars quickly noted that the book "e;will henceforth be the starting point for any general discussion of the early Renaissance."e; The Times Literary Supplement called it "e;a model of the kind of intensive study on which all understanding of cultural process must rest."e; First published in 1955 in two volumes, the work was reissued in a one-volume Princeton edition in 1966.

"Separated from the mainland of Africa for 160 million years, Madagascar has evolved an incredible wealth of biodiversity, with thousands of species that can be found nowhere else on earth. For instance, of its estimated 12,000 plant species, nearly 10,000 are unique to Madagascar. Malagasy animals are just as spectacular, from its almost forty currently recognized species of lemurs-a primate group found only here-to the numerous species of tiny dwarf chameleons. With astounding frequency scientists discover a previously unknown species in Madagascar-and at almost the same rate another natural area of habitat is degraded or destroyed, a combination that recently led conservation organizations to name Madagascar one of the most important and threatened conservation priorities on the planet. The New Natural History of Madagascar provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date synthesis available of this island nation's priceless biological treasures. Contributions cover the history of scientific exploration in Madagascar, its geology and soils, climate, forest ecology, human ecology, marine and coastal ecosystems, plants, invertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Detailed discussions of conservation efforts in Madagascar highlight several successful park reserve programs that could serve as models for other areas"--