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Elsevier

Books in Arts and humanities

Elsevier's Arts and Humanities titles encompass a rich spectrum of scholarship that explores human culture, history, philosophy, and creative expression. These works offer deep insights into language, literature, visual arts, and critical theory, supporting the academic community in understanding diverse perspectives and cultural legacies. Designed for scholars, educators, and students, this collection bridges classic studies with contemporary issues, fostering a deeper appreciation and knowledge of the human experience.

  • Theory of Phase Transitions

    Rigorous Results
    • 1st Edition
    • Ya. G. Sinai
    • D. Ter Haar
    • English
    Theory of Phase Transitions: Rigorous Results is inspired by lectures on mathematical problems of statistical physics presented in the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. The aim of the book is to expound a series of rigorous results about the theory of phase transitions. The book consists of four chapters, wherein the first chapter discusses the Hamiltonian, its symmetry group, and the limit Gibbs distributions corresponding to a given Hamiltonian. The second chapter studies the phase diagrams of lattice models that are considered at low temperatures. The notions of a ground state of a Hamiltonian and the stability of the set of the ground states of a Hamiltonian are also introduced. Chapter 3 presents the basic theorems about lattice models with continuous symmetry, and Chapter 4 focuses on the second-order phase transitions and on the theory of scaling probability distributions, connected to these phase transitions. Specialists in statistical physics and other related fields will greatly benefit from this publication.

  • Leonid I. Brezhnev

    Pages from His Life
    • 1st Edition
    • Leonid I. Brezhnev
    • English

  • The Quality of Life: Systems Approaches

    Proceedings of the International Congress on Applied Systems Research and Cybernetics
    • 1st Edition
    • G.E. Lasker
    • English
    Applied Systems and Cybernetics covers the proceedings of the International Congress on Applied Systems Research and Cybernetics. The book presents several studies that cover the application of systems research and cybernetics in improving the quality of life. Majority of the materials in the text tackle various aspects of quality of life in relation to systems and cybernetics, such as living space, future prospects, work, education, politics, law, ethics and values, culture and ethnicity, and social systems. The selection also presents articles that cover the elemental properties of quality of life, such as the concept, views, indicators, and dimension. The book will be of great interest to any scientists regardless of disciplines, since it covers the main purpose of science, the improvement of quality of life.

  • Learning to Hear

    • 1st Edition
    • Edith Whetnall + 1 more
    • R. B. Niven
    • English
    Learning to Hear provides an introduction to the best methods of early detection of deafness. This book discusses the approach to the problems of congenital deafness. Organized into nine chapters, this book begins with an overview of the anatomy, physiology, and psychology of hearing and speech. This text then presents some basic ideas about the way in which speech works and shows the reasons why the position of the deaf child is by no means as hopeless as it would first appear. Other chapters consider all information about the acoustics of speech sounds and provide an account of the various types of deafness. This book discusses as well the effects that deafness introduces and shows how far these may be overcome. The final chapter deals with the use of binaural hearing aids from the moment of diagnosis to help handicapped child to learn to hear. This book is a valuable resource for otologists.

  • Man Meets Microbes

    An Introduction to Medical Microbiology
    • 1st Edition
    • Jennifer R. Jamison
    • English
    Man meets Microbes: An Introduction to Medical Microbiology is concerned with the infective aspects of disease in man. It considers the role of organisms in causing disease and also with the response to, and defense of man against these organisms. The book begins with a general introduction, providing a survey of the history of microbiology and a classification of micro-organisms and parasites capable of causing disease in man. Subsequent chapters are devoted to discussions on such topics as host-parasite relationships, parasites, bacteria and viruses, and organ systems and how they get infected with disease. The final chapter covers certain topics such as infection during pregnancy, fever, and nursing being a hazardous occupation. Microbiologists and those in the medical profession will find the book very useful.

  • The Aesthetic Imperative

    Relevance and Responsibility in Arts Education
    • 1st Edition
    • Malcolm Ross
    • English
    The Aesthetic Imperative: Relevance and Responsibility in Arts Education is a collection of papers that covers various concerns in assessment in the context of arts education. In the first chapters, the text examines the predicament of the arts. The next two chapters relate assessment in the context of esthetic education and evaluation in the arts. Chapter 4 talks about the assessment of esthetic developments in the visual mode. The fifth chapter details the importance of evaluating the quality of the test itself, while the sixth chapter covers the conflict between schools and art education. In Chapter 7, the book talks about treating English as an art. The eighth chapter discusses the relevance of art in education, while the ninth chapter provides a conclusive discussion on art education. The text will be of great interest to readers who are concerned with the status of art as part of a school curriculum.

  • The Bibliographic Control of Official Publications

    Guides to Official Publications
    • 1st Edition
    • John E. Pemberton
    • English
    The Bibliographic Control of Official Publications discusses the various approaches used by libraries to organize official documents. This book aims to stimulate progress towards the establishment of a comprehensive system for the bibliographic control of official publications, and identify the principles upon which a new and definitive coding scheme could be based. The book contains 11 chapters that cover the following topics: notation for the arrangement of official publications in the library of La Trobe University, Australia; the handling of official publications at the State Reference Library of Western Australia; organization and bibliographic control of a large official publications collection in the Library of Parliament, Ottawa, Canada; and application of the CODOC (Co-operative Documents) system in Canada. Also included are chapters on the evolution of cataloging and shelf arrangement of official publications in Trinity College Library, Dublin; the University of Colorado's classification system for documents of international organizations; and the University of Virginia Library's document classification system.

  • Mathematics as a Cultural System

    • 1st Edition
    • Raymond L. Wilder
    • Mario Bunge
    • English
    Mathematics as a Cultural System discusses the relationship between mathematics and culture. The book is comprised of eight chapters discussing topics that support the concept of mathematics as a cultural system. Chapter I deals with the nature of culture and cultural systems, while Chapter 2 provides examples of cultural patterns observable in the evolution of mechanics. Chapter III treats historical episodes as a laboratory for the illustration of patterns and forces that have been operative in cultural change. Chapter IV covers hereditary stress, and Chapter V discusses consolidation as a force and process. Chapter VI talks about the singularities in the evolution of mechanics, while Chapter 7 deals with the laws governing the evolution of mathematics. Chapter VIII tackles the role and future of mathematics. The book will be of great interest to readers who are curious about how mathematics relates to culture.

  • Popper and After

    Four Modern Irrationalists
    • 1st Edition
    • D. C. Stove
    • English
    Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists focuses on a tendency in the philosophy of science, of which the leading representatives are Professor Sir Karl Popper, the late Professor Imre Lakatos, and Professors T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend. Their philosophy of science is in substance irrationalist. They doubt, or deny outright, that there can be any reason to believe any scientific theory; and a fortiori they doubt or deny, for example, that there has been any accumulation of knowledge in recent centuries. The book is composed of two parts and Part One explains how these writers succeeded in making irrationalism about science acceptable to readers. Part Two explores the intellectual influence that led these writers to embrace irrationalism about science.

  • Relativity

    The Theory and Its Philosophy
    • 1st Edition
    • Roger B. Angel
    • Mario Bunge
    • English
    Relativity: The Theory and its Philosophy provides a completely self-contained treatment of the philosophical foundations of the theory of relativity. It also surveys the most essential mathematical techniques and concepts that are indispensable to an understanding of the foundations of both the special and general theories of relativity. In short, the book includes a crash course in applied mathematics, ranging from elementary trigonometry to the classical tensor calculus. Comprised of 11 chapters, this book begins with an introduction to fundamental mathematical concepts such as sets, relations, and functions; N-tuples, vectors, and matrices; and vector algebra and calculus. The discussion then turns to the concept of relativity and elementary foundations of Newtonian mechanics, as well as the principle of special relativity and its philosophical interpretation by means of empiricism and rationalism. Subsequent chapters focus on the status of the doctrine of conventionalism in the theory of special relativity; the commensurability of classical and relativistic mechanics; mathematical foundations of special relativistic physics; and the classical or Newtonian theory of gravitation. The principle of general covariance and its relation to the principle of general relativity are also examined. The final chapter addresses the fundamental question as to the actual information concerning the structure of spacetime that is conveyed to us through the theory of general relativity. This monograph will be of interest to students, teachers, practitioners, and researchers in physics, mathematics, and philosophy.

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