This retrospective collection of stories from all phases of Niven's writing career is rich with gossip, storytelling vigor, and sheer science-fictional play.

Problem solving is an essential part of every scientific discipline. It has two components: (1) problem identification and formulation, and (2) solution of the formulated problem. One can solve a problem on its own using ad hoc techniques or follow those techniques that have produced efficient solutions to similar problems. This requires the understanding of various algorithm design techniques, how and when to use them to formulate solutions and the context appropriate for each of them. This book advocates the study of algorithm design techniques by presenting most of the useful algorithm design techniques and illustrating them through numerous examples.

Some theoreticians contemplate and formulate the physics of tachyons, which are hypothetical particles, that would always travel faster than light but which could never slow down to the speed of light just as they anticipate sublight speed massive particles never being able to achieve light speed. So my theoretical work on the physics and kinematics of light-speed massive systems sets me apart from general trends in the theoretical field of relativistic astronautics. This book is a continuation of how and why we may be able to, at some future time, travel at the speed of light.

Book 4 in the Princeton Mathematical Series. Originally published in 1941. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The foundation of computer science is built upon the following questions: What is an algorithm? What can be computed and what cannot be computed? What does it mean for a function to be computable? How does computational power depend upon programming constructs? Which algorithms can be considered feasible? For more than 70 years, computer scientists are searching for answers to such qu- tions. Their ingenious techniques used in answering these questions form the theory of computation. Theory of computation deals with the most fundamental ideas of computer s- ence in an abstract but easily understood form. The notions and techniques employed are widely spread across various topics and are found in almost every branch of c- puter science. It has thus become more than a necessity to revisit the foundation, learn the techniques, and apply them with con?dence. Overview and Goals This book is about this solid, beautiful, and pervasive foundation of computer s- ence. It introduces the fundamental notions, models, techniques, and results that form the basic paradigms of computing. It gives an introduction to the concepts and mathematics that computer scientists of our day use to model, to argue about, and to predict the behavior of algorithms and computation. The topics chosen here have shown remarkable persistence over the years and are very much in current use.

Wireless sensor networks are about to be part of everyday life. Homes and workplaces capable of self-controlling and adapting air-conditioning for different temperature and humidity levels, sleepless forests ready to detect and react in case of a fire, vehicles able to avoid sudden obstacles or possibly able to self-organize routes to avoid congestion, and so on, will probably be commonplace in the very near future. Mobility plays a central role in such systems and so does passive mobility, that is, mobility of the network stemming from the environment itself. The population protocol model was an intellectual invention aiming to describe such systems in a minimalistic and analysis-friendly way. Having as a starting-point the inherent limitations but also the fundamental establishments of the population protocol model, we try in this monograph to present some realistic and practical enhancements that give birth to some new and surprisingly powerful (for these kind of systems) computational models. Table of Contents: Population Protocols / The Computational Power of Population Protocols / Enhancing the model / Mediated Population Protocols and Symmetry / Passively Mobile Machines that Use Restricted Space / Conclusions and Open Research Directions / Acronyms / Authors' Biographies