Winner of the National Book Award: In the shadow of the Holocaust, a young girl discovers the power of magic In the schoolroom of a simple European village, Kicsi spends her days dreaming of the lands beyond the mountains: Paris and New York, Arabia and Shanghai. When the local rabbi curses Kicsi’s school for teaching lessons in Hebrew, the holy tongue, the possibility of adventure seems further away than ever. But when a mysterious stranger appears telling stories of far-off lands, Kicsi feels the world within her grasp. His name is Vörös, and he is a magician’s assistant who seems to have powers all his own. There is darkness growing at the edge of the village—a darkness far blacker than any rabbi’s curse. Vörös warns of the Nazi threat, but only Kicsi hears what he says. As evil consumes a continent, Vörös will teach Kicsi that sometimes the magician’s greatest trick is survival.

Offers a snapshot concerning the state of the art in the areas of differential, difference and q-difference equations.

This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications QUASICLASSICAL METHODS is based on the proceedings of a very successful one-week workshop with the same title, which was an integral part of the 1994-1995 IMA program on "Waves and Scattering." We would like to thank Jeffrey Rauch and Barry Simon for their excellent work as organizers of the meeting. We also take this opportunity to thank the National Science Foun dation (NSF), the Army Research Office (ARO) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), whose financial support made the workshop possible. A vner Friedman Robert Gulliver v PREFACE There are a large number of problems where qualitative features of a partial differential equation in an appropriate regime are determined by the behavior of an associated ordinary differential equation. The example which gives the area its name is the limit of quantum mechanical Hamil tonians (Schrodinger operators) as Planck's constant h goes to zero, which is determined by the corresponding classical mechanical system. A sec ond example is linear wave equations with highly oscillatory initial data. The solutions are described by geometric optics whose centerpiece are rays which are solutions of ordinary differential equations analogous to the clas sical mechanics equations in the example above. Much recent work has concerned with understanding terms beyond the leading term determined by the quasi classical limit. Two examples of this involve Weyl asymptotics and the large-Z limit of atomic Hamiltonians, both areas of current research.

This volume is the record of a workshop on differential equations and the Stokes phenomenon, held in May 2001 at the University of Groningen. It contains expanded versions of most of the lectures given at the workshop. To a large extent, both the workshop and the book may be regarded as a sequel to a conference held in Groningen in 1995 which resulted in the book The Stokes Phenomenon and Hilbert's 16th Problem (B L J Braaksma, G K Immink and M van der Put, editors), also published by World Scientific (1996).Both books offer a snapshot concerning the state of the art in the areas of differential, difference and q-difference equations. Apart from the asymptotics of solutions, Painlevé properties and the algebraic theory, new topics addressed in the second book include arithmetic theory of linear equations, and Galois theory and Lie symmetries of nonlinear differential equations.

With more than 1,700 cross-referenced entries covering every aspect of World War II, the events and developments of the era, and myriad related subjects as well as a documents volume, this is the most comprehensive reference work available on the war. This encyclopedia represents a single source of authoritative information on World War II that provides accessible coverage of the causes, course, and consequences of the war. Its introductory overview essays and cross-referenced A–Z entries explain how various sources of friction culminated in a second worldwide conflict, document the events of the war and why individual battles were won and lost, and identify numerous ways the war has permanently changed the world. The coverage addresses the individuals, campaigns, battles, key weapons systems, strategic decisions, and technological developments of the conflict, as well as the diplomatic, economic, and cultural aspects of World War II. The five-volume set provides comprehensive information that gives readers insight into the reasons for the war's direction and outcome. Readers will understand the motivations behind Japan's decision to attack the United States, appreciate how the concentration of German military resources on the Eastern Front affected the war's outcome, understand the major strategic decisions of the war and the factors behind them, grasp how the Second Sino-Japanese War contributed to the start of World War II, and see the direct impact of new military technology on the outcomes of the battles during the conflict. The lengthy documents volume represents a valuable repository of additional information for student research.

Karl Jommers is a straight-shooting therapist committed to helping blue-collar men overcome their reluctance to seek counseling, a mission instilled in him after the suicide of his steelworker father. After a cop is set up to be shot, Jommers must evaluate the two police officers involved. They both offer conflicting accounts, but neither is lying. Their divergent perspectives are blurred by their personal anxieties and politics. Where one sees acts of local corruption, the other envisions a government conspiracy that includes covert dispersion of anxiogenic chemicals. Jommers methodically tries to disentangle the discordance, but is faced with a quandary. He can’t square his patients’ differing views without first discerning the truth of what happened. But stepping outside his domain to investigate may jeopardize his faltering practice and possibly his life. As he labors to clear the angst-fogged lenses of others, he is forced to question the clarity of his own perception.