Convex optimization problems arise frequently in many different fields. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the subject, and shows in detail how such problems can be solved numerically with great efficiency. The book begins with the basic elements of convex sets and functions, and then describes various classes of convex optimization problems. Duality and approximation techniques are then covered, as are statistical estimation techniques. Various geometrical problems are the...

This groundbreaking textbook combines straightforward explanations with a wealth of practical examples to offer an innovative approach to teaching linear algebra. Requiring no prior knowledge of the subject, it covers the aspects of linear algebra - vectors, matrices, and least squares - that are needed for engineering applications, discussing examples across data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, signal and image processing, tomography, navigation, control, and financ...

Dixon and Amelie Boyd were Belfast medical students. Later he was a Cambridge Professor and she an Academic's wife. They and their four sons, became a Cambridge mid-century fixture. Their copious letters (and memories of those sons, the authors) bring to light an unvarnished picture of that University at a time of dramatic change.Darlingest, It not only seems but it was a long time ago. We were half our present ages; the war was no more than a shadow of a man's hand in bright sunli...

Humanism and Religion in Early Modern Spain brings together twenty-five essays by renowned historian Terence O’Reilly.The essays examine the interplay of religion and humanism in a series of writings composed in sixteenth-century Spain. It begins by presenting essential background: the coming together during the reign of the Emperor Charles V of Erasmian humanism and various movements of religious reform, some of them heterodox. It then moves on to the reign of Philip II, ...

Updating the extremely successful Wildlife Toxicology and Population Modeling (CRC Press, 1994), Wildlife Toxicology: Emerging Contaminant and Biodiversity Issues brings together a distinguished group of international contributors, who provide a global assessment of a range of environmental stressors, including pesticides, environmental contaminant

The corpus of literary works shaped by the Renaissance and the Baroque that appeared in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a transforming effect on writing throughout Europe and left a rich legacy that scholars continue to explore. For four decades after the Spanish Civil War the study of this literature flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, where many of the leading scholars in the field were based. Though this particular 'Golden Age' was followed by a decline for...

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) directed the composition of an encyclopaedic work on the world of the Nahuas, Universal History of the Things of New Spain (ca. 1577-1579), for which he has received the title of pioneering ethnographer and anthropologist of colonial Mexico. Contextualizing Sahagún and his work in sixteenth-century Spain and America, this study presents him as a cultural translator who reconceptualized the Nahua world according to his own Euro-Christian categorization...

Although their milieu bore striking similarities to the Wild West, the people of medieval Spain were preoccupied with constructing valid laws and learning how best to abide by them. This obsession with legality comes out in epics, songs, stories, and even in miracles of the Virgin Mary. Scholars have largely failed to see the usefulness of considering the different types of text produced under Alfonso X together, preferring to look at them in isolation or in conjunction with later literatu...

Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain, a large number of parodic works were produced that featured depictions of humourous, satirical, and comical saints. The Laughter of the Saints examines this rich carnivalesque tradition of parodied holy men and women and traces their influence to the anti-heroes and picaresque roots of early modern novels such as Don Quixote.The first full-length treatment of the ways in which Spanish writers imitated religious dep...

In this study on the subject of the Spanish courtly gentleman of the sixteenth century, the author traces the courtly gentlemans life ideals as they appear first in Montalvos Amadis de Gaula and later in Il Cortegiano of Castiglione. The study also appraises what new perspectives and attitudes are at the center of Castigliones view of cortegiania and how these elements are reflected in other Spanish courtesy books subsequent to The Courtiers arrival and publication in Spain. In the last pa...

Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular ...

Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a deep consideration of the intellectual environment that gave rise to Cervantes’ seminal work. Susan Byrne demonstrates how Cervantes synthesized the debates surrounding the two most authoritative discourses of his era – those of law and history – into a new aesthetic product, the modern novel.Byrne uncovers the empirical underpinnings of Don Quixote through a close philological study of Cervantes’ sly questioning of a...