Books published by World Scientific Publishing Company

In China, many excellent students in mathematics take an active part in various mathematical contests, and each year, the best six senior high school students are selected to form the IMO National Team to compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad. In the past ten years, China's IMO Team has achieved outstanding results - they won first place almost every year.The authors of this book are coaches of the China national team. They are Xiong Bin, Xiao Liang, Yu Hongbing, Yao Yijun, Qu Zhenhua, Li Ting, Ai Yinhua, Wang Bin, Fu Yunhao, He Yijie, Zhang Sihui, Wang Xinmao, Lin Tianqi, Xu Disheng, et al. Those who took part in the translation work are Chen Haoran and Zhao Wei.The materials of this book come from a series of two books (in Chinese) on Forward to IMO: a collection of mathematical Olympiad problems (2021-2022). It is a collection of problems and solutions of the major mathematical competitions in China. It provides a glimpse of how the China national team is selected and formed.

Differential Geometry is one of the major branches of current Mathematics, and it is an unavoidable language in modern Physics. The main characters in Differential Geometry are smooth manifolds: a class of geometric objects that locally behave like the standard Euclidean space.The book provides a first introduction to smooth manifolds, aimed at undergraduate students in Mathematics and Physics. The only prerequisites are the Linear Algebra and Calculus typically covered in the first two years. The presentation is as simple as possible, but it does not sacrifice the rigor.The lecture notes are divided into 10 chapters, with gradually increasing difficulty. The first chapters cover basic material, while the last ones present more sophisticated topics. The definitions, propositions, and proofs are complemented by examples and exercises. The exercises, which include part of the proofs, are designed to help the reader learn the language of Differential Geometry and develop their problem-solving skills in the area. The exercises are also aimed at promoting an active learning process. Finally, the book contains pictures which are useful aids for the visualization of abstract geometric situations. The lecture notes can be used by instructors as teaching material in a one-semester course on smooth manifolds.

This book contends that the housing markets and shadow banking have been involved in a kind of "dance" over the last two decades. It traces this dance to be between the roles of mortgage markets since the 1980s in both the US and China and the developments of securitization and "shadow banks." It gives side-by-side comparisons between the two and suggests that house price dynamics have been similar, but also quite different. Both had booms. The US had a bubble that burst around 2007 - after prices became quite high relative to rents and then crashed. However, Chinese housing markets, which had a similar run-up, did not have a burst bubble. Rather, the rising property values appear to have been from space becoming more valuable as reflected in rent growth. In the US, prices chased prices; in China, prices chased rents.Mortgage markets were more complicated, beginning with the securitization in the US, and the rise of shadow banks that both led and followed. The US used shadow banks to hold pieces of securitization deals and funded them with deposit-like debt. These pieces were fragile and their collapse caused "silent runs," which were instrumental in the ensuing crash. China's shadow banks were more like traditional intermediaries, unattached to securitization. Their liabilities were mostly not short-term, as was the case with US shadow banks. So, runs were not a problem, but getting the market to work efficiently was.The markets have evolved. And while the music has changed, the dance is not over.

Arguably one of the most iconic mega-cities in Asia, Tokyo, the capital of Japan, plays an important economic and cultural role. It has been featured in various media as a liveable city with a well-developed public transport system. Yet, what international media coverage often misses out are its unique neighbourhoods and districts. Known as kaiwai, they are scattered in a mosaic from downtown Tokyo to its suburbs, exemplifying a type of urbanism wholly unique to Asia and foreshadowing a future vision which suggests regional autonomy in a post-COVID-19 world.In this book, the authors thoroughly investigate the city's multi-layered spatial and sociocultural aspects, introducing a side of Tokyo little known to the world at large. Readers who are only familiar with Tokyo's depiction as an ultra-modern city will appreciate the book's insights into the kaiwai phenomenon, the pre-modern urban structure of Edo city, and contemporary Tokyo's Asian urbanism, including traditional community activities such as local festivals, the formation of new communities by old and new residents, and intimate community life using a network of alleys. Combining urban planning, sociological, anthropological and architectural perspectives, the book's interdisciplinary approach looks at Tokyo from the peripherical to the kaiwai-level.

This unique compendium describes the development status and trends of international climate-smart agriculture, research methods and development strategies, monitoring, evaluation and extension, typical cases and their implications for the development of climate-smart agriculture in China.The useful reference text also comprehensively summarizes the relevant achievements and experiences obtained by the Climate-Smart Staple Crop Production Project, and highlights future policy suggestions and technical systems.

This book provides a broad introduction to integrable systems with many degrees of freedom. Within a much larger orbit, discussed are models such as the classical Toda lattice, Calogero fluid, and Ablowitz-Ladik discretized nonlinear Schrödinger equation. On the quantum mechanical side, featured are the Lieb-Liniger delta-Bose gas and the quantum Toda lattice. As a genuinely novel twist, the study deals with random initial data described by generalized Gibbs ensembles with parameters of slow spatial variation. This is the hydrodynamic scale, in spirit similar to the ballistic Euler scale of nonintegrable simple fluids. While integrable microscopic particle models are very diverse, the central theme of this book is to elucidate their structural similarity on hydrodynamic scales.

This book contains examples written by internationally recognized experts applying proteomics and analysis applications of mass spectrometry in their everyday research. They dedicate this book to a broad audience of all scientists to encourage them to use the omics approach to investigate biological processes.The first chapter is a short introduction to the basics of analytical chemistry. The following chapters describe high-throughput proteomic studies and how they are applied in various areas of biological and biomedical sciences, providing valuable insights into how biological systems work at the molecular level.

This book is a useful guide for researchers involved in the technological innovation and production of shale gas exploration and development. It offers a thorough understanding of seismic technologies and their application in shale gas exploration and extraction.This book comprehensively and systematically presents the significance of seismic technologies in predicting shale gas sweet spots. It introduces state-of-the-art seismic-based prediction technologies as well as case studies showcasing their implementation in primary shale gas production areas in China. Innovativeness is one of the highlights of this book. Cutting-edge technologies, such as AI applied in identifying shale gas sweet spots, and achieving excellent results in shale gas production are presented.Readers will gain insights into the latest methodologies, models, and real-world examples, equipping them with the necessary tools to navigate the complex landscape of shale gas resources.

This unique compendium stresses on physical concepts and the applications to practical problems. The authors' decades of experience in teaching, research and industrial consultancy are reflected in the choice of the solved examples and unsolved problems.The second edition has three additional chapters containing topics of vibration and acoustic sensors and instruments, finite element method (FEM), boundary element method (BEM) and statistical energy analysis (SEA), etc, thus enabling students to solve real-life problems in industrial and automotive noise control.The useful reference text targets senior undergraduate mechanical and environmental engineering students as well as designers of industrial machinery and layouts. The book can readily be used for self-study by practicing designers and engineers. Mathematical derivations are avoided and illustrations, tables and empirical formulae are included for ready reference.

The book's content is designed to provide practical guidance and insights for conducting experiments in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and publishing the results in scientific journals. It includes a detailed explanation of how to conduct HRI experiments and what to do and what not to do to get an article accepted for publication. It is tailored to those seeking to deepen their understanding of HRI methodologies, statistical measurements, and research design. The case studies and examples featured in the book focus on interactions between social robots and specific demographics such as children and older adults, making it relevant for individuals working in healthcare, education, and related domains.Also covered are common statistical measurements used in HRI research and quantitative, qualitative, and meta-analyses. The concepts are illustrated with several international case studies of interactions between social robots and children and older adults and robot learning instead of programming. The final chapter explores current trends in HRI and provides insights into what to look for in the coming years. It includes an extensive reference section to help HRI researchers in all these areas.This book will appeal to an international audience of advanced students, researchers, industry, and others who are actively engaged or interested in the field of HRI.

This third book on Quark-Gluon plasma and heavy ion collisions follows the previous ones, published in 1988 and 2005, that described theoretical proposals for a large program, and then the QGP discovery at RHIC.The present one describes the rather mature field, with extensive program at RHIC and LHC colliders and corresponding theory. QGP turns out to be a strongly coupled medium made up of quarks and gluons, existing in exploding fireballs. It is the hottest form of matter created in a laboratory. Other subjects discussed in the book are QCD vacuum structure, including topological solitons and nonperturbative phenomena. It also includes some recent progress in theory of hadrons, bridging hadronic spectroscopy with partonic observables.

The contributions in the book are devoted to the memory of Michael E Fisher, and hence include many personal memories from people whose work was influenced by him. Also, the book is a collection of articles from leaders in the field of phase transitions and critical phenomena, to celebrate 50 years of the renormalization group and the 1972 paper by Wilson and Fisher. Many of the articles review, in tutorial form, the progress in the fields of phase transitions and the renormalization group.

In the existing reports on national competitiveness and rankings such as IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook and WEF Global Competitiveness Report, there are sizable discrepancies in the ranking order for the same countries. As a result, the reader is often confused because such an outcome creates difficulties for government officials when translating these findings into real-world policies.These discrepancies are actually due to the differences in logic and analytical models used by IMD and WEF. Therefore, in recognizing the problems and limitations of these models, this book presents the IPS model as a new approach. As an extension of Michael Porter's diamond model, it demonstrates a robust set of methodologies as well as offers a number of key policy implications for countries around the world that wish to enhance their national competitiveness.The analytical tools used in this book can be further utilized for other units of analysis such as industries and firms. As this book provides a series of sophisticated methodologies and specific guidelines for enhancing national competitiveness, both academics and practitioners can derive useful implications from this research.Alongside the theoretical frameworks and methodologies for national competitiveness presented in this book, the special theme and focus of this third volume is the fourth industrial revolution and the emerging technologies that are relevant to corporate and national competitiveness.The discussion on the digitalization of business began as early as the 1990s, but emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing have only been a recent trend. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of emerging technologies by both firms and countries. Yet, despite the growing importance of emerging technologies, firms and governments seem to be lagging in effectively integrating them into their operations. To address these challenges, this book explains how emerging technologies have affected firms, industries, and countries. It also welcomes discussion on how firms and countries are responding to the changing environment to enhance their competitiveness through these new technologies.

This volume contains six chapters which cover several modern topics of quantitative finance and reflect the most significant trends currently shaping this field. The chapters discuss in detail and make original contributions to stochastic/fractional volatility models and their asymptotic solutions (Chapter 1); equity trading, optimal portfolios and related problems (Chapters 2, 5, 6); machine learning and NLP (Chapters 2, 3); and economic scenario generation (Chapter 4), and are written by the leading experts in the field. This book is useful for both researchers and practitioners.

Financial fraud is a serious and seemingly intractable problem. Financial scandals regularly punctuate newspaper headlines and regulators and auditors appear bereft of effective responses. But has this always been the case?This book quantifies financial crime in the UK using three centuries of data. It demonstrates how financial fraud and scandal vary according to systematic economic and institutional arrangements. In doing so, it retells the history of British capitalism, from the mercantilism of the eighteenth century to the financial capitalism of the twenty-first century, illustrating the often negative consequences of economic ideology, policy and structure. It identifies periods when fraud has been less problematic and contrasts these with times when it has surged. The variation of outcomes reflects the balance of power between the state, industrial and financial sectors, the provision of credit through risky lending, and the effectiveness of audits. "Rogue traders" and other flawed individuals are frequently the focus of blame narratives constructed with the intention of deflecting comprehensive systematic reforms.

Human Resource Management in Singapore - The Complete Guide covers a wide spectrum of human resource management topics in five volumes: Employment Management, Work and Remuneration, Employee Benefits, Performance and Development, and Employee Conduct and Relations. In every chapter, the WHY, WHAT and HOW are presented lucidly. The books are a must-have GPS for any human resource practitioner in Singapore. Students, academics and bosses into human resource management as well as overseas human resource practitioners will also find the books helpful and instructive.Volume C on Employee Benefits brings readers through a wide array of employee and leave benefits, both mandatory and discretionary including medical, dental, transport, insurance, overseas posting incentives, long service awards, flexible benefits and more. Employee benefits do much to convey an organisation's total employee value proposition. The design of benefits requires astute judgment; in showing empathy for employees' needs, it must also be deliberate and purposeful to steer employee behaviours and incisive to exact a return for the organisation. Installing a new benefit is easy; unwinding one is less straightforward. Are benefits being appreciated? What are the potential abuses? Are there better and more cost-effective solutions? Are flexible benefits or the clean wage system the way to go? These will be discussed to help readers gain insights into the realm of employee benefits.

Founded in 1985 by Jean-Claude Falmagne and Jean-Paul Doignon, Knowledge Structure Theory (KST) constitutes a rigorous and current mathematical theory for the representation and the assessment of human knowledge. The seminal work of these authors initiated a highly active research strand with an ever-growing literature, mostly scattered across various technical journals.Starting from a concise but comprehensive introduction to its foundations, this volume provides a state-of-the-art review of KST. For the first time the volume brings together the most important theoretical developments and extensions of the last decade and presents new areas of application beyond education, with contributions by key researchers in the field.Among the important advances covered by this book are (1) a comprehensive treatment of probabilistic models in KST; (2) polytomous extensions of the theory; (3) KST-based psychological diagnostics and neuropsychological assessment; (4) the representation and assessment of cognitive skills in problem solving, as well as procedural skills. In addition, this book also includes an overview of available software for the application of KST.

This unique comprehensive compendium provides extensive studies on reversible cellular automata (RCAs), exhibiting a wide range of interesting phenomena similar to the Game-of-Life, a well-known irreversible CA.The useful reference text also introduces innovative approaches to constructing universal computers in a reversible cellular space. Numerous figures are included to illustrate the evolution of RCA configurations, and to elucidate theoretical results on RCAs. Additionally, readers can observe evolution processes of various RCAs on the free CA simulator Golly using supplementary files.

Guest-edited by Dr Michel Meyer (CNRS, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon) and Prof. Demetrio Milea (Università degli Studi di Messina), Emerging Analytical Techniques for Chemical Speciation Studies focuses on a selection of valuable instrumental methods for investigating complex formation equilibria in solution, providing information on the speciation (stoichiometry and in some instances structure of the formed species) but also allowing the measurement of thermodynamic parameters (equilibrium constants, reaction enthalpy and entropy). The title is split into two volumes belonging to the Series on Chemistry, Energy and the Environment. Part 1 (Volume 15 of this series), discusses various electrochemical, electromigration, and thermophoresis-based methods. Authored by eminent practitioners in their field, each of the four chapters covers both the theoretical and the practical aspects with helpful experimental guidelines. The latest technical and computational advances are described in a way that unambiguously show the major contributions of the authors at the top of their field. Hence, this book is intended to be a valuable introduction to newcomers, while being at the same time a helpful companion to more experienced users of each instrumental techniques. It provides an up-to-date overview with useful tips and hints on the application of selected cutting-edge analytical methods that allow unravelling and modelling intricate complex formation equilibria. So far, there has been no such book focussing specifically on the measurement of thermodynamic parameters, while covering such a wide panel of techniques. This book will be of interest to a broad readership, including analytical, coordination, supramolecular, environmental, instrumental, and physical chemists, radiochemists, electrochemists, and biochemists among others.

Human Resource Management in Singapore - The Complete Guide covers a wide spectrum of human resource management topics in five volumes: Employment Management, Work and Remuneration, Employee Benefits, Performance and Development, and Employee Conduct and Relations. In every chapter, the WHY, WHAT and HOW are presented lucidly. The books are a must-have GPS for any human resource practitioner in Singapore. Students, academics and bosses into human resource management as well as overseas human resource practitioners will also find the books helpful and instructive.Volume B on Work and Remuneration deals with regulatory provisions and practices on working hours and payments for overtime and work on rest days and public holidays. The primary takeaway is a comprehensive cover of salary design using the principles of pay positioning and pay mix. Salary instruments including salary ranges, increments, allowances, fixed and variable bonuses, sales commission and gainsharing incentive plans are explained. Readers are guided through salary interventions such as salary adjustments, deductions and cuts, as well as salary survey and benchmarking, and salary administration and governance. The last chapter discusses how to manage and raise the wages of lower-wage workers, a very pertinent topic in Singapore. This volume will equip readers with salary concepts, insights and practical pointers to design and manage a salary blend that will support an organisation's talent strategy.

Complex Analytic Geometry is a subject that could be termed, in short, as the study of the sets of common zeros of complex analytic functions. It has a long history and is closely related to many other fields of Mathematics and Sciences, where numerous applications have been found, including a recent one in the Sato hyperfunction theory.This book is concerned with, among others, local invariants that arise naturally in Complex Analytic Geometry and their relations with global invariants of the manifold or variety. The idea is to look at them as residues associated with the localization of some characteristic classes. Two approaches are taken for this - topological and differential geometric - and the combination of the two brings out further fruitful results. For this, on one hand, we present detailed description of the Alexander duality in combinatorial topology. On the other hand, we give a thorough presentation of the ¿ech-de Rham cohomology and integration theory on it. This viewpoint provides us with the way for clearer and more precise presentations of the central concepts as well as fundamental and important results that have been treated only globally so far. It also brings new perspectives into the subject and leads to further results and applications.The book starts off with basic material and continues by introducing characteristic classes via both the obstruction theory and the Chern-Weil theory, explaining the idea of localization of characteristic classes and presenting the aforementioned invariants and relations in a unified way from this perspective. Various related topics are also discussed. The expositions are carried out in a self-containing manner and includes recent developments. The profound consequences of this subject will make the book useful for students and researchers in fields as diverse as Algebraic Geometry, Complex Analytic Geometry, Differential Geometry, Topology, Singularity Theory, Complex Dynamical Systems, Algebraic Analysis and Mathematical Physics.

Corresponding to the link of Itô's stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and linear parabolic equations, distribution dependent SDEs (DDSDEs) characterize nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations. This type of SDEs is named after McKean-Vlasov due to the pioneering work of H P McKean (1966), where an expectation dependent SDE is proposed to characterize nonlinear PDEs for Maxwellian gas. Moreover, by using the propagation of chaos for Kac particle systems, weak solutions of DDSDEs are constructed as weak limits of mean field particle systems when the number of particles goes to infinity, so that DDSDEs are also called mean-field SDEs. To restrict a DDSDE in a domain, we consider the reflection boundary by following the line of A V Skorohod (1961).This book provides a self-contained account on singular SDEs and DDSDEs with or without reflection. It covers well-posedness and regularities for singular stochastic differential equations; well-posedness for singular reflected SDEs; well-posedness of singular DDSDEs; Harnack inequalities and derivative formulas for singular DDSDEs; long time behaviors for DDSDEs; DDSDEs with reflecting boundary; and killed DDSDEs.

High-order harmonic generation (HHG) in solids, the nonlinear upconversion of coherent radiation resulting from the interaction of a strong and short laser pulse with bulk matter, has come of age. Since the seminal experiments and theoretical developments, there has been a constant and vibrant interest in this topic. In this book, we invite experimental and theoretical experts in the field with the aim to summarize the progress made so far and propose new possibilities and prospects for the generation of high-order harmonics using solid samples. Nowadays, it is possible to engineer, both spatially and temporally with nanometric and attosecond resolution, the driven fields. This could bring solid HHG to the next exciting frontier as novel and fully tunable table-top coherent sources.