Book Review: Mathematical Introduction to Economics

Book Review: “Introduction to Artificial Life”

Despite the popularity of artificial life over the last 15 years or so, as witnessed by the establishment of several international conferences on the subject and the birth of the Artificial Life Journal and similar publications, there has been a conspicuous lack of decent introductory texts on the subject. Notable exceptions include “Artificial Life: An Introduction” (Langton 1995), an eclectic...

Book Review The Economics of Russian Transition

This formidable book, organised into 26 chapters plus 6 scientific and statistical appendices, provides very detailed testimony and analysis of a group of economists, most members of the Institute of Economic Transition (IET) headed by Gaidar, intermittently at or near the helm of the Russian Government and the reforms during 1991–1993, and later leader of 'Democratic Choice', a liberal, market...

Book Review: Mathematical Linguistics by Kornai, András

For readers of traditional textbooks such as that of Partee, ter Meulen, and Wall (1990), the term 'mathematical linguistics' denotes a rather narrowly circumscribed set of issues including automata theory, set theory, and lambda calculus, with maybe a little formal language theory thrown in. Kornai's contribution is refreshingly different in that he treats, in this relatively compact volume, p...

Book Review Introduction to Concurrency in Programming Languages

Parallel programming is mainstream scientific programming. A desktop workstation can easily have hundreds of pipelines. An undergraduate course in, say, computational physics should introduce the student to parallel solutions. What issues arise in parallel programming that don’t arise in sequential programming? How are the issues treated? And what text to use to explain the differences? For bon...

Book Review: Populist Systems: A General Introduction