The book deals with the (elementary and introductory) theory of valuation rings. As explained in the introduction, this represents a useful and important viewpoint in algebraic geometry, especially concerning the theory of algebraic curves and their function fields. The correspondences of this with other viewpoints (e.g. of geometrical or topological nature) are often indicated, also to provide motivations and intuition for many results. Links with arithmetic are also often indicated. There are three appendices, concerning Hilbert’s Nullstellensatz (for which several proofs are provided), Puiseux series and Dedekind domains. There are also several exercises, often accompanied by hints, which sometimes develop further results not included in full for brevity reasons.

The book originates from the Elliptic PDE course given by the first author at the Scuola Normale Superiore in recent years. It covers the most classical aspects of the theory of Elliptic Partial Differential Equations and Calculus of Variations, including also more recent developments on partial regularity for systems and the theory of viscosity solutions.

The goal of this book is to be an accessible guide for undergraduate and graduate students to the new field of data-driven biology. Next-generation sequencing technologies have put genome-scale analysis of gene expression into the standard toolbox of experimental biologists. Yet, biological interpretation of high-dimensional data is made difficult by the lack of a common language between experimental and data scientists. By combining theory with practical examples of how specific tools were used to obtain novel insights in biology, particularly in the neurosciences, the book intends to teach students how to design, analyse, and extract biological knowledge from transcriptome sequencing experiments. Undergraduate and graduate students in biomedical and quantitative sciences will benefit from this text as well as academics untrained in the subject.

This book is the third edition of the 1999 lecture notes of the courses on interpolation theory that the author delivered at the Scuola Normale in 1998 and 1999. In the mathematical literature there are many good books on the subject, but none of them is very elementary, and in many cases the basic principles are hidden below great generality. In this book the principles of interpolation theory are illustrated aiming at simplification rather than at generality. The abstract theory is reduced as far as possible, and many examples and applications are given, especially to operator theory and to regularity in partial differential equations. Moreover the treatment is self-contained, the only prerequisite being the knowledge of basic functional analysis.

These lecture notes are devoted to the analysis of a nonlocal equation in the whole of Euclidean space. In studying this equation, all the necessary material is introduced in the most self-contained way possible, giving precise references to the literature when necessary. The results presented are original, but no particular prerequisite or knowledge of the previous literature is needed to read this text. The work is accessible to a wide audience and can also serve as introductory research material on the topic of nonlocal nonlinear equations.

The book provides a non-perturbative approach to the symmetry breaking in the standard model, in this way avoiding the critical issues which affect the standard presentations. The debated empirical meaning of global and local gauge symmetries is clarified. The absence of Goldstone bosons in the Higgs mechanism is non-perturbatively explained by the validity of Gauss laws obeyed by the currents which generate the relatedglobal gauge symmetry. The solution of the U(1) problem and the vacuum structure in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) are obtained without recourse to the problematic semiclassical instanton approximation, by rather exploiting the topology of the gauge group.