When Bill James published his original Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as the “holy book of baseball.” Now, baseball's beloved “Sultan of Stats” (The Boston Globe) is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium. Like the original, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is really several books in one. The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called “Win Shares,” a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself.

This book covers topics appropriate for a first-year graduate course preparing students for the doctorate degree. The first half of the book presents the core of measure theory, including an introduction to the Fourier transform. This material can easily be covered in a semester. The second half of the book treats basic functional analysis and can also be covered in a semester. After the basics, it discusses linear transformations, duality, the elements of Banach algebras, and C*-algebras. It concludes with a characterization of the unitary equivalence classes of normal operators on a Hilbert space. The book is self-contained and only relies on a background in functions of a single variable and the elements of metric spaces. Following the author's belief that the best way to learn is to start with the particular and proceed to the more general, it contains numerous examples and exercises.

Celebrate your own nonconformist place in the world of art. Going far beyond standard notions of developing an abstract "style" or particular "look," Creating Abstract Art unleashes the numerous possibilities that abound in your creative subconscious. Familiar obstacles such as "I don't know what to paint" or "How do I know if this is good?" are easily set aside as you explore fun exercises such as connecting dots, automatic drawing, shadow hunting, working with haiku poetry paintings and much more. So turn off the noise in your head, follow your own instincts and delight in what emerges! • 40 exercises exploring original ideas and inventive techniques for making abstract art. • Projects can be done in any order and with nearly any materials--start working right away on any project that grabs your attention! • 50 contemporary artists share diverse work and viewpoints on the process of working abstractly. Write your own artistic license and start Creating Abstract Artyour way, today!

Foundations of Abstract Analysis is the first of a two book series offered as the second (expanded) edition to the previously published text Real Analysis. It is written for a graduate-level course on real analysis and presented in a self-contained way suitable both for classroom use and for self-study. While this book carries the rigor of advanced modern analysis texts, it elaborates the material in much greater details and therefore fills a gap between introductory level texts (with topics developed in Euclidean spaces) and advanced level texts (exclusively dealing with abstract spaces) making it accessible for a much wider interested audience. To relieve the reader of the potential overload of new words, definitions, and concepts, the book (in its unique feature) provides lists of new terms at the end of each section, in a chronological order. Difficult to understand abstract notions are preceded by informal discussions and blueprints followed by thorough details and supported by examples and figures. To further reinforce the text, hints and solutions to almost a half of more than 580 problems are provided at the end of the book, still leaving ample exercises for assignments. This volume covers topics in point-set topology and measure and integration. Prerequisites include advanced calculus, linear algebra, complex variables, and calculus based probability.