Matthew Baker

Equal parts speculative and satirical, the stories in Why Visit America form an exegesis of our current political predicament, while offering an eloquent plea for connection and hope. The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the broke-down United States. So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker’s brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection Why Visit America. The book opens with a seemingly traditional story in which the speculative element is extremely minimal—the narrator has a job that doesn’t actually exist—a story that wouldn’t seem much out of place in a collection of literary realism. From there the stories get progressively stranger: a young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition—from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child—her own—from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory—his entire life—is wiped clean. As the book moves from universe to universe, the stories cross between different American genres: from bildungsroman to rom com, western to dystopian, including fantasy, horror, erotica, and a noir detective mystery. Read together, these parallel-universe stories create a composite portrait of the true nature of the United States and a Through the Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.

Stories

Why Visit America

When the grandfather he never knew is released from prison suffering from dementia, eleven-year-old Nicholas, a mathematical and musical genius, tries to save the family's home by helping search for heirlooms Grandpa claims to have buried.

If you find this

Perché l'America

Omid Amini

Xander Faber

Over the past decade, it has become apparent that tropical geometry and non-Archimedean geometry should be studied in tandem; each subject has a great deal to say about the other. This volume is a collection of articles dedicated to one or both of these disciplines. Some of the articles are based, at least in part, on the authors' lectures at the 2011 Bellairs Workshop in Number Theory, held from May 6-13, 2011, at the Bellairs Research Institute, Holetown, Barbados. Lecture topics covered in this volume include polyhedral structures on tropical varieties, the structure theory of non-Archimedean curves (algebraic, analytic, tropical, and formal), uniformisation theory for non-Archimedean curves and abelian varieties, and applications to Diophantine geometry. Additional articles selected for inclusion in this volume represent other facets of current research and illuminate connections between tropical geometry, non-Archimedean geometry, toric geometry, algebraic graph theory, and algorithmic aspects of systems of polynomial equations.

Tropical and Non-Archimedean Geometry

Stefania Sesia

Issam Toufik

"Where this book is exceptional is that the reader will not just learn how LTE works but why it works" Adrian Scrase, ETSI Vice-President, International Partnership Projects Following on the success of the first edition, this book is fully updated, covering the latest additions to LTE and the key features of LTE-Advanced. This book builds on the success of its predecessor, offering the same comprehensive system-level understanding built on explanations of the underlying theory, now expanded to include complete coverage of Release 9 and the developing specifications for LTE-Advanced. The book is a collaborative effort of more than 40 key experts representing over 20 companies actively participating in the development of LTE, as well as academia. The book highlights practical implications, illustrates the expected performance, and draws comparisons with the well-known WCDMA/HSPA standards. The authors not only pay special attention to the physical layer, giving an insight into the fundamental concepts of OFDMA-FDMA and MIMO, but also cover the higher protocol layers and system architecture to enable the reader to gain an overall understanding of the system. Key New Features: Comprehensively updated with the latest changes of the LTE Release 8 specifications, including improved coverage of Radio Resource Management RF aspects and performance requirements Provides detailed coverage of the new LTE Release 9 features, including: eMBMS, dual-layer beamforming, user equipment positioning, home eNodeBs / femtocells and pico cells and self-optimizing networks Evaluates the LTE system performance Introduces LTE-Advanced, explaining its context and motivation, as well as the key new features including: carrier aggregation, relaying, high-order MIMO, and Cooperative Multi-Point transmission (CoMP). Includes an accompanying website containing a complete list of acronyms related to LTE and LTE-Advanced, with a brief description of each (http://www.wiley.com/go/sesia_theumts) This book is an invaluable reference for all research and development engineers involved in implementation of LTE or LTE-Advanced, as well as graduate and PhD students in wireless communications. Network operators, service providers and R&D managers will also find this book insightful.

From Theory to Practice

LTE - The UMTS Long Term Evolution

Mixing mystery and adventure in the tradition of Louis Sachar, Avi, and E.L. Konigsburg, If You Find This is the story of unlikely friendships, unexpected bravery and eleven-year-old Nicholas Funes's quest to prove his grandfather's treasure is real. Nicholas is a math and music genius with no friends and a huge problem: His father has lost his job, and they'll have to sell their house, which holds the only memory Nicholas has of his younger brother. Just in time, Nicholas's senile grandfather arrives, filled with tales of priceless treasure he has hidden somewhere in town--but where? With the help of misfit classmates, two grandfathers, a ghosthouse, hidden messages, séances, and an uncanny mind for numbers, Nicholas stages a nursing home breakout, tangles with high schoolers in smugglers' tunnels, and gets swept up in a duel with the biggest bullies in the neighborhood. Will it be enough to find the treasure and save his house?

If You Find This

Robert S. Rumely

The purpose of this book is to develop the foundations of potential theory and rational dynamics on the Berkovich projective line over an arbitrary complete, algebraically closed non-Archimedean field. In addition to providing a concrete and ``elementary'' introduction to Berkovich analytic spaces and to potential theory and rational iteration on the Berkovich line, the book contains applications to arithmetic geometry and arithmetic dynamics. A number of results in the book are new, and most have not previously appeared in book form. Three appendices--on analysis, $\mathbb{R}$-trees, and Berkovich's general theory of analytic spaces--are included to make the book as self-contained as possible. The authors first give a detailed description of the topological structure of the Berkovich projective line and then introduce the Hsia kernel, the fundamental kernel for potential theory. Using the theory of metrized graphs, they define a Laplacian operator on the Berkovich line and construct theories of capacities, harmonic and subharmonic functions, and Green's functions, all of which are strikingly similar to their classical complex counterparts. After developing a theory of multiplicities for rational functions, they give applications to non-Archimedean dynamics, including local and global equidistribution theorems, fixed point theorems, and Berkovich space analogues of many fundamental results from the classical Fatou-Julia theory of rational iteration. They illustrate the theory with concrete examples and exposit Rivera-Letelier's results concerning rational dynamics over the field of $p$-adic complex numbers. They also establish Berkovich space versions of arithmetic results such as the Fekete-Szego theorem and Bilu's equidistribution theorem.

Potential Theory and Dynamics on the Berkovich Projective Line

Diebe, Lügner und Helden wie wir

Matthew Baker novelláinak középpontjában Amerika áll, és a szerző mindegyikben ugyanazt az izgalmas kérdést feszegeti: mi történik az országgal és lakosaival, ha megváltoztatunk benne valamit, akármilyen apró dolgot? A könyvben található tizenhárom történet a szépirodalom, szatíra, disztópia és science fiction eszköztárával különböző Amerikákba nyújt betekintést: olyanba, ahol a gyerekeket a születésük pillanatában elszakítják a szüleiktől; ahol az idősek hetvenéves korukban rituális öngyilkosságot követnek el, hogy ne jelentsenek terhet a családjuk számára; ahol a bűnözőket az emlékeik kitörlésével rehabilitálják és engedik vissza a társadalomba. De megnézhetjük, hogy mi történik akkor, ha az országot a nők uralják és elenyészően kevés férfi van már csak életben, valamint szemtanúi lehetünk egy igazán történelmi pillanatnak is: amikor egy kis texasi település úgy dönt, hogy elszakad Amerikától és létrehozza saját mikronemzetét. Az Egy nehéz nap Utópiában korunk legfontosabb társadalmi kérdéseit feszegeti, mégsincs benne két egyforma történet. Baker sajátosan egyedi, lenyűgöző prózája hosszú időre az olvasóval marad, miközben olyan jövőképek tárulnak fel előtte, amik bármelyik pillanatban valósággá válhatnak.

Egy nehéz nap Utópiában

Sam Payne

This volume grew out of two Simons Symposia on "Nonarchimedean and tropical geometry" which took place on the island of St. John in April 2013 and in Puerto Rico in February 2015. Each meeting gathered a small group of experts working near the interface between tropical geometry and nonarchimedean analytic spaces for a series of inspiring and provocative lectures on cutting edge research, interspersed with lively discussions and collaborative work in small groups. The articles collected here, which include high-level surveys as well as original research, mirror the main themes of the two Symposia. Topics covered in this volume include: Differential forms and currents, and solutions of Monge-Ampere type differential equations on Berkovich spaces and their skeletons; The homotopy types of nonarchimedean analytifications; The existence of "faithful tropicalizations" which encode the topology and geometry of analytifications; Relations between nonarchimedean analytic spaces and algebraic geometry, including logarithmic schemes, birational geometry, and the geometry of algebraic curves; Extended notions of tropical varieties which relate to Huber's theory of adic spaces analogously to the way that usual tropical varieties relate to Berkovich spaces; and Relations between nonarchimedean geometry and combinatorics, including deep and fascinating connections between matroid theory, tropical geometry, and Hodge theory.

Nonarchimedean and Tropical Geometry

Three boys, two grandpas, a tree, a map and some hidden treasure... Let the adventure begin. Eleven-year-old Nicholas Funes knows he's weird. He plays the violin far too well to be cool, he collects square roots and prime numbers and, weirdest of all, he talks to a tree who he believes is his brother. Plus, he doesn't have all that many friends. But even he is about to struggle with how strange his life is about to get. His long-lost and never-spoken-about Grandfather Rose turns up on Nicholas's doorstep one day, fresh out of a lifetime's prison sentence and suffering from dementia. Curious about this grandfather he's never known, Nicholas tries to unravel Grandfather Rose's stories. In particular, one about the family treasure that he hid years ago and that will be the solution to all their rather pressing financial woes. Because his mother needs to sell their house, and if they leave the house, they'll leave Nicholas's brother behind. And Nicholas is desperate to keep what little family he has together. With the help of two extremely unlikely allies, Nicholas must unwrap the secrets of his family's past in order to give them a shot at a future.

Matthew Baker

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