“Both Susan and Michael were disappointed because of Lisa having left. Will she come back and confirm she is a traveller from the past, like they think?” to be written on the back cover.

Susan Morrow had come from an alternative laterally inverted world, where she had been there instead of Michael Morrow. They are now collaborating together on whether there could be any other travellers. Could that be likely, considering that her pet dog, Fido, had come through the same portal as her?

Observer Design for Nonlinear Systems deals with the design of observers for the large class of nonlinear continuous-time models. It contains a unified overview of a broad range of general designs, including the most recent results and their proofs, such as the homogeneous and nonlinear Luenberger design techniques. The book starts from the observation that most observer designs consist in looking for a reversible change of coordinates transforming the expression of the system dynamics into some specific structures, called normal forms, for which an observer is known. Therefore, the problem of observer design is broken down into three sub-problems: • What are the available normal forms and their associated observers?• Under which conditions can a system be transformed into one of these forms and through which transformation? • How can an inverse transformation that recovers an estimate in the given initial coordinates be achieved? This organisation allows the book to structure results within a united framework, highlighting the importance of the choice of the observer coordinates for nonlinear systems. In particular, the first part covers state-affine forms with their Luenberger or Kalman designs, and triangular forms with their homogeneous high-gain designs. The second part addresses the transformation into linear forms through linearization by output injection or in the context of a nonlinear Luenberger design, and into triangular forms under the well-known uniform and differential observability assumptions. Finally, the third part presents some recently developed methods for avoiding the numerically challenging inversion of the transformation. Observer Design for Nonlinear Systems addresses students and researchers looking for an introduction to or an overview of the state of the art in observer design for nonlinear continuous-time dynamical systems. The book gathers the most important results focusing on a large and diffuse literature on general observer designs with global convergence, and is a valuable source of information for academics and practitioners.

The authors have developed a methodology for control of nonlinear systems in the presence of long delays, with large and rapid variation in the actuation or sensing path, or in the presence of long delays affecting the internal state of a system. In addition to control synthesis, they introduce tools to quantify the performance and the robustness properties of the designs provided in the book. The book is based on the concept of predictor feedback and infinite-dimensional backstepping transformation for linear systems and the authors guide the reader from the basic ideas of the concept?with constant delays only on the input?all the way through to nonlinear systems with state-dependent delays on the input as well as on system states. Readers will find the book useful because the authors provide elegant and systematic treatments of long-standing problems in delay systems, such as systems with state-dependent delays that arise in many applications. In addition, the authors give all control designs by explicit formulae, making the book especially useful for engineers who have faced delay-related challenges and are concerned with actual implementations and they accompany all control designs with Lyapunov-based analysis for establishing stability and performance guarantees.

This textbook on models and modeling in mechanics introduces a new unifying approach to applied mechanics: through the concept of the open scheme, a step-by-step approach to modeling evolves. The unifying approach enables a very large scope on relatively few pages: the book treats theories of mass points and rigid bodies, continuum models of solids and fluids, as well as traditional engineering mechanics of beams, cables, pipe flow and wave propagation.

Law's Ideal Dimension provides a comprehensive account in English of renowned legal theorist Robert Alexy's understanding of jurisprudence, as expanded upon from his publications A Theory of Legal Argumentation (OUP 1989), A Theory of Constitutional Rights (OUP 1985), and The Argument fromInjustice (OUP 1992).The collection is divided into three parts. Part One concerns the nature of law: it explores its real and ideal dimensions and how the ideal dimension of law is sometimes employed but does not play a systematically important role. Part Two discusses constitutional rights, human rights, andproportionality. It defends the construction of constitutional rights as principles against objections raised by the rule construction and elaborates on the nature of constitutional rights as well as the mathematical balancing of those rights. Part Three concerns the relation between argumentation,correctness, and law. The author concludes this volume with a biographical reflection.

This volume contains a collection of papers in control theory and applications presented at a conference in honor of Clyde Martin on the occasion of his 60th birthday, held in Lubbock, Texas, November 14-15, 2003.