Between the second, third and fourth centuries the Christian Church produced biographies chronicling the pious undertakings of monks. These hagiographies borrowed from preexisting Greek biographies to distinguish the Christian monk from the pagan holy man. Patricia Cox Miller’s Biography in Late Antiquity: The Quest for the Holy Man demonstrates how hagiographers adaptation of Greek biographies...

For a set A of n applicants and a set I of m items, let us consider the problem of matching applicants to items, where each applicant x ∈ A provides its preference list defined on items. We say that an applicant x prefers an item p than an item q if p is located at higher position than q in its preference list. For any matchingsM andM′ of the matching problem, we say that an applicant x prefers...

One of the most fundamental and ubiquitous problems in microeconomics and operations research is how to assign objects to agents based on their individual preferences. An assignment is called popular if there is no other assignment that is preferred by a majority of the agents. Popular assignments need not exist, but the minimax theorem implies the existence of a popular random assignment. In t...

For a set A of n people and a set B ofm items, with each person having a preference list that ranks all items from most wanted to least wanted, we consider the problem of matching every person with a unique item. A matchingM is called -popular if for any other matching M ′, the number of people who prefer M ′ to M is at most n plus the number of those who prefer M to M ′. In 2006, Mahdian showe...

It is good to see that London has produced an atlas well worthy to replace the German atlases which hitherto have flooded the country. The present atlas has twenty-four pages of illustrated letterpress and a fine plate illustrating the anatomy and physiology of the female body. The plates are extremely good, the muscles and chief organs being very distinct. We can strongly recommend this atlas ...

In this paper we consider the problem of computing an ‘‘optimal’’ popular matching. We assume that our input instance G = (A∪P , E1 ∪̇ · · · ∪̇ Er ) admits a popular matching and here we are asked to return not any popular matching but an optimal popular matching, where the definition of optimality is given as a part of the problem statement; for instance, optimality could be fairness inwhich cas...

We provide further explanation of the significance of an example in a recent paper of Wolf in the context of the problem of finding large subspaces in sumsets. Throughout these notes G will denote the group F2 , that is the n-dimensional vector space over F2, and PG will denote the normalized counting measure on G. The convolution of two functions f, g ∈ L(PG) is defined to be f ∗ g(x) := ∫ f(y...

This paper argues for analyses of the changing conditions of collective action on the international stage using the method of incorporating comparisons. Third World revolutions, national liberation movements, and related peasant-urban revolts of the 1950s and 1960s took place in a context shaped decisively by emerging states, developmental projects, and international sponsorship and control. Si...