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This book in two volumes provides an overview of continuous, discrete and functional optimization techniques.

This book in two volumes provides an overview of continuous, discrete and functional optimization techniques. This first volume is devoted to continuous optimization, which deals with problems with real variables, without or with constraints. After a reminder of the optimality conditions and their geometrical interpretation, the topics covered are: - gradient-free algorithms that can be applied to any type of function;- unconstrained algorithms based on Newton-type descent methods;- algorithms with constraints: penalization, primal, dual and primal-dual methods;- linear programming with the simplex method and interior point methods.The emphasis is on understanding the principles rather than on mathematical rigor. Each concept or algorithm is accompanied by a detailed example to help you grasp the main ideas. This book is the result of 30 years of experience and is intended for students, researchers and engineers wishing to acquire a general knowledge in the field of optimization.

No detailed description available for "What is Space-Time Made of ?".

The Earth is the only planet in the Solar System where liquid water is present on the surface, a condition that seems necessary for the development of life. Its sisters Venus and Mars are extremely different. Why did these three planets, born under fairly comparable conditions, evolve to the conditions we observe today? Understanding the physical or chemical factors that are at the origin of such divergent evolutions is a first step in an approach to the problem of the origin of life on Earth.

No detailed description available for "Li-ion batteries".

No detailed description available for "Measuring the Soul".

No detailed description available for "CaO-SiO2-AI2O3-Fe oxides chemical system".

No detailed description available for "AMETIS".

No detailed description available for "Einstein's Witches' Sabbath and the Early Solvay Councils".

What is the connection between planet Mars and Iron man, nickel ans the Seven Dwarves, or DNA, walnuts and Jupiter, fuchsine, the fox and Zorro, or even ammoniac and god Amun?This book tells the stories behind the naming of the elements, whether they are chemical elements of the Periodic Table, first published by Mendeleev in 1869, or organic elements which are components of DNA and RNA, as well as proteins, themselves elements of living kingdom, plants and animals. The book goes further, into materials and products which became essential elements of modern life.Readers will learn that the names often refer to (or reveal) dreams and aspirations of men and women of their time. This truly amazing history of the names guides us through an incredible set of worlds: nature, astronomy, history, literature, journeys, and even takes in contributions from legends and mythology.

Understanding how diverse planet systems were formed and how they evolved are challenges that hundreds of researchers are working on. Does any of these planets harbor life?We do not yet have an answer, but the new means of observation that astronomers have and will soon have at their disposal are so powerful that they could give a first answer soon

Most of the experimental notes of Fizeau have been preserved as well as many of his instruments, making it possible to reconstruct the processes of his research in an exceptionally precise and detailed manner. The book, illustrated with numerous autographs and featuring important unpublished texts, is written in a lively and easily accessible way.

This book introduces the basic concepts of photoemission: core level and valence band photoemission, together with many recent developments on current topics.

How could a self-taught scholar of the calibre of Gaston Contremoulins be forgotten? Driven by his fascination with photography and the discovery of X-rays by Roentgen in 1897, he was the first to invent a device capable of locating intracranial foreign bodies.

This multidisciplinary book is the result of a collective work synthesizing presentations made by various specialists during the CNRS BIODEMAT school, which took place in October 2014 in La Rochelle, France. It is designed for readers of a range of scientific specialties (chemistry, biology, physics...) and examines various industrial problems.

This book contains statistics courses on basic to advanced methods with practical exercises using the R environment, by leading experts in their field. This covers the foundations of Bayesian inference, Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, model building, Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) and Bayesian nonparametric inference and clustering.

This book aims to provide basic knowledge to better understand the nature of fossil fuels and their importance in the economies of the industrialized countries. The book also explains why their future availability will play a vital role in the future economic and social transformations in these countries.

Glass-ceramics are now commonplace in our daily lives, despite having only been discovered for less than a century. It presents an update on the recent developments concerning the mechanisms of nucleation, crystal growth and phase separation, bringing together theoretical aspects and characterization methods.

What makes one author a good communicator and another a poor one? How to communicate scientific results through adequate and efficient scientific writing? How does the editorial process of a journal function, and why do scientific papers need to be refereed? All these questions, and many more, were the drivers for organizing in 2008 and in 2009 the three-day "Scientific Writing for Young Astronomers" courses for beginning PhD Students. This book copes with the preparation of manuscripts, with communicating with editors and referees, and with avoiding common errors in scientific writing. An entire chapter is devoted to communication with graphics, i.e., to various facets of visual communication by way of images, graphs, diagrams and tabular material. Special attention is given to the verity of graphical content, and to misrepresentations and errors in graphics and associated basic statistics. The central theme throughout this book is truthful communication of scientific results, involving the ethical principles of proper conduct in research and in scientific writing. Although the SWYA project was conceived for young astronomers, this Volume is far more than just a book for young astronomy students: it addresses many general issues related to technical, scientific, and social aspects of scientific writing, and is meant for a much wider audience. This includes graduate and seasoned students, as well as postdoctoral fellows and thesis supervisors in almost any discipline of the exact sciences. As the underlying theme is that verity and truth are the core business of science, it makes this book also of interest to scientometrists and science administrators.

The book you are about to read is remarkable in the sense that it makes the foundations of astronomical spectroscopy accessible to all and provides practical advice for its application. It will without doubt give you the desire to embark on this great adventure and provides you the means to achieve it.

The description of ocean water masses is based on the study of their temperature, salinity, and density, virtual genetic imprints which provide identity and movement to water masses.

Our knowledge of the Milky Way has been deeply renewed since a dozen years, following the results of the astrometric satellite HIPPARCOS, and those of large stellar surveys. Many concepts thought to be well established disappeared, to be replaced by others going towards a larger complexity: in particular, the discovery of radial migrations of stars has blurred the simple image that we had of the Galactic disk. There has been large progress in some domains, for instance the physics of the Galactic Center with its super-massive black hole; other problems remain unsolved, such as the nature of the dark matter existing like a halo around our Galaxy. This book reviews our present knowledge of the Milky Way, in the simplest and most didactic way as possible. Basic notions are always recalled, which make the book accessible to readers without any advanced formation in astronomy. This basic work will be very helpful to understand the results expected from GAIA, the new ESA astrometric satellite launched on December 19, 2013.

The evolution of nuclear reactors since the 1942 Fermi experiment can be described along the lines of natural history, with an initial flourish of uninhibited creativity followed by a severe selection process leading to a handful of surviving species, with light water reactors occupying most of the biotope today. This book combines four approaches: - A descriptive one. This gives an overview of the main strengths and weaknesses of the different reactor systems. - A historical approach, from the 1940's to nowadays, with an extrapolation to the near future. The LWR dominance being firmly established, what is the next step? - An axiomatic approach. Starting with a set of long term criteria concerning the fuel cycle sustainability, a conceptual solution is established, and then a family of reactor systems is selected for development and qualification. - A dynamic approach. In the early 2000s, the prevailing image combined a "nuclear renaissance", a strong limitation of the greenhouse gases concentration and a dynamic growth of the world economy. Updating the strategy in the wake of the last decade events requires a sharper understanding of the driving forces as well as of the influence of the post-Fukushima safety framework on the design constraints. All the books of the "Génie Atomique" series have adopted an instructional approach. Initially intended for INSTN's students, they can be greatly helpful to physicists and engineers involved in the development or operational aspects of nuclear power.

For centuries, scientists have been fascinated by the role of the Sun in the Earth's climate system. Recent discoveries, outlined in this book, have gradually unveiled a complex picture, in which our variable Sun affects the climate variability via a number of subtle pathways, the implications of which are only now becoming clear. This handbook provides the scientifically curious, from undergraduate students to policy makers with a complete and accessible panorama of our present understanding of the Sun-climate connection. 61 experts from different communities have contributed to it, which reflects the highly multidisciplinary nature of this topic. The handbook is organised as a mosaic of short chapters, each of which addresses a specific aspect, and can be read independently. The reader will learn about the assumptions, the data, the models, and the unknowns behind each mechanism by which solar variability may impact climate variability. None of these mechanisms can adequately explain global warming observed since the 1950s. However, several of them do impact climate variability, in particular on a regional level. This handbook aims at addressing these issues in a factual way, and thereby challenge the reader to sharpen his/her critical thinking in a debate that is frequently distorted by unfounded claims.

Finally the Europhysics News columns, "Physics in Daily Life," are brought together in one inspiring volume. These pages hold the wonders of a candle flame, the secret of surviving the sauna heat, and the mysteries of bubbles and balloons. Find answers to questions like "Why is water blue? How do we localize sound? Why is ice so slippery?" and "What is the speed of falling raindrops?" For everybody with a bit of physics background this book playfully reveals insights into everyday conundrums. This is science at its most accessible and satisfying.

Steels are a class of materials with multiple and complicated transformations; this is true even for steels of the basic cutlery industry. A damascus steel is a fascinating subject to study, rich in multiple facets, that appears in a fi rst approach as a composite material artistically exploited. Damacus steel was developed in the first millennium AD in India or Sri-Lanka. Its reputation is related to its exceptional properties and to the moire pattern. A similar damask pattern could be obtained by forge-welding giving rise to controversies. Recent fi ndings allow a better understanding of this pattern formation. This book presents firstly, observations of ancient blade samples examined with modern technologies such as electron microscopy. The features of many typical swords from different periods are discussed: Celtic, Merovingian, Viking and oriental wootz swords, Persian shamshirs, Japanese katana, rapiers etc. In the second part, microstructural observations at different levels of magnifi cation are displayed and their interpretation is discussed in detail, thus revealing the secret of sophisticated forgings. One chapter is devoted to introducing the main transformations undergone by these steels during the forging processes. The book is intended for all those people interested in the history of science and more specifi cally to the metallurgists, to the archaeologists and all the researchers confronted with the problems of the expertise of the vestiges, to the blacksmiths, and to the collectors of valuable artistic blades. Madeleine Durand-Charre has taught structural metallurgy at the Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble and at the University Joseph Fourier of Grenoble. Her research work concerned microstructure formation and determination of phase equilibria. She investigated complex alloys such as superalloys and steels. Her work on vanadium cast irons was awarded the Vanadium Shield in 1989 from the Institute of Metals. She is author of several books and articles in metallurgy.

Radiation protection is a major challenge in the industrial applications of ionising radiation, both nuclear and non-nuclear, as well as in other areas such as the medical and research domains. The overall objective of this textbook is to participate to the development of European high-quality scheme and good practices for education and training in radiation protection (RP), coming from the new Council Directive 2013/59/Euratom laying down basic safety standards for protection against the dangers arising from exposure to ionising radiation. These ERPTS (European Radiation Protection Training Scheme) reflects the needs of the Radiation Protection Expert (RPE) and the Radiation Protection Officer (RPO), specifically with respect to the Directive 2013/59/Euratom in all sectors where ionising radiation are applied. To reflect the RPE training scheme, six chapters have been developed in this textbook: 1.Radioactivity and nuclear physics, 2.Interaction of ionising radiation with matter, 3.Dosimetry, 4.Biological effects of ionising radiation 5.Detection and measurement of ionising radiation, 6.Uses of sources of ionising radiation. The result is a homogeneous textbook, dealing with the ERPTS learning outcomes suggested by ENETRAP II project (European Network on Education and Training in RAdiological Protection II) from the 7th Framework Programme. A cyberbook is also part of the whole training material to develop the concept of "learning more" (http: //www.rpe-training.eu). The production of this first module "basics" training material, in the combined form of a textbook plus a cyberbook as learning tools, will contribute to facilitate mutual recognition and enhanced mobility of these professionals across the European Union. The authors, all experts in radiation protection and particularly involved in radiation protection training, participated in the realisation of this textbook under the coordination of Philippe Massiot and Christine Jimonet, Researchers-Engineers at the National Institute for Nuclear Science and Technology (INSTN), the education and training institution part of the CEA (French Atomic Energy and alternative energies Commission).