Immersive environments such as virtual reality technology makes possible can respond to their audiences, so that each person's experience of the environment is unique. This volume brings together 11 essays along with artists' projects produced at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada to explore issues raised by the creation of virtual environments. The essays approach the social and cultural implications of cyberspace from the perspective of cultural studies, communications, art history, art criticism, English, and women's studies; while artists who created nine virtual worlds at the Banff Centre discuss what they have tried to accomplish in both theoretical and technical terms. With 64 illustrations, including 18 color plates. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Triangular algebras and nest algebras are two important classes of non-selfadjoint operator algebras. In this book, the author uses the new depth of understanding which the similarity theory for nests has opened up to study ideals of nest algebras. In particular, a unique largest diagonal-disjoint ideal is identified for each nest algebra. Using a construction proposed by Kadison and Singer, this ideal can be used to construct new maximal triangular algebras. These new algebras are the first concrete descriptions of maximal triangular algebras that are not nest algebras.

The following gives a development of Arakelov theory general enough to handle not only regular arithmetic surfaces but also a large class of arithmetic surfaces whose generic fiber has singularities. This development culminates in an arithmetic Riemann-Roch theorem for such arithmetic surfaces. The first part of the memoir gives a treatment of Deligne's functorial intersection theory, and the second develops a class of intersection functions for singular curves which behaves analogously to the canonical Green's functions introduced by Arakelov for smooth curves.

For each infinite cardinal [lowercase Greek]Kappa, we give a structural characterization of the graphs with no [italic capital]K[subscript lowercase Greek]Kappa minor. We also give such a characterization of the graphs with no "half-grid" minor.

Numerically speaking, continuous time dynamical systems do not exist. Rather, a discretized version is studied and interpreted in analogy to the continuous time dynamical system. Over fixed finite time intervals, this analogy is quite close and well understood in terms of discretization errors and sophisticated discretization schemes. Over large or infinite time intervals, this analogy is not so clear, because discretization errors tend to accumulate exponentially with time. In this paper, we specifically investigate the correspondence between continuous and discrete time dynamical systems for homoclinic orbits. By definition, these are orbits which tend to the same stationary point for both large positive and large negative times.

We undertake a systematic study of cyclic phenomena for composition operators. Our work shows that composition operators exhibit strikingly diverse types of cyclic behavior, and it connects this behavior with classical problems involving complex polynomial approximation and analytic functional equations.

In this power we show how to compute the parameter space [italic capital]X for the versal deformation of an isolated singularity ([italic capital]V, 0) under the assumptions [italic]dim [italic capital]V [greater than or equal to symbol] 4, depth {0} [italic capital]V [greater than or equal to symbol] 3, from the CR-structure on a link [italic capital]M of the singularity. We do this by showing that the space [italic capital]X is isomorphic to the space (denoted here by [script capital]K[subscript italic capital]M) associated to [italic capital]M by Kuranishi in 1977. In fact we produce isomorphisms of the associated complete local rings by producing quasi-isomorphisms of the controlling differential graded Lie algebras for the corresponding formal deformation theories.