Generalized Polygons is the first book to cover, in a coherent manner, the theory of polygons from scratch. In particular, it fills elementary gaps in the literature and gives an up-to-date account of current research in this area, including most proofs, which are often unified and streamlined in comparison to the versions generally known. Generalized Polygons will be welcomed both by the student seeking an introduction to the subject as well as the researcher who will value the work as a reference. In particular, it will be of great value for specialists working in the field of generalized polygons (which are, incidentally, the rank 2 Tits-buildings) or in fields directly related to Tits-buildings, incidence geometry and finite geometry. The approach taken in the book is of geometric nature, but algebraic results are included and proven (in a geometric way!). A noteworthy feature is that the book unifies and generalizes notions, definitions and results that exist for quadrangles, hexagons, octagons - in the literature very often considered separately - to polygons. Many alternative viewpoints given in the book heighten the sense of beauty of the subject and help to provide further insight into the matter.​

Dedicated to the Russian mathematician Albert Shiryaev on his 70th birthday, this is a collection of papers written by his former students, co-authors and colleagues. The book represents the state-of-the-art of a quickly maturing theory and will be an essential source for researchers in this area. The diversity of topics and comprehensive style of the papers make the book attractive for Ph.D. students and young researchers.

This book presents and illustrates the main tools and ideas of algebraic graph theory, with a primary emphasis on current rather than classical topics. It is designed to offer self-contained treatment of the topic, with strong emphasis on concrete examples.

This book gives an introduction to the field of Incidence Geometry by discussing the basic families of point-line geometries and introducing some of the mathematical techniques that are essential for their study. The families of geometries covered in this book include among others the generalized polygons, near polygons, polar spaces, dual polar spaces and designs. Also the various relationships between these geometries are investigated. Ovals and ovoids of projective spaces are studied and some applications to particular geometries will be given. A separate chapter introduces the necessary mathematical tools and techniques from graph theory. This chapter itself can be regarded as a self-contained introduction to strongly regular and distance-regular graphs. This book is essentially self-contained, only assuming the knowledge of basic notions from (linear) algebra and projective and affine geometry. Almost all theorems are accompanied with proofs and a list of exercises with full solutions is given at the end of the book. This book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in the fields of combinatorics and incidence geometry.

When? These are the proceedings of Finite Geometries, the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference, which took place from Sunday 16 to Friday 21 July, 2000. It was organised by the editors of this volume. The Third Conference in 1990 was published as Advances in Finite Geometries and Designs by Oxford University Press and the Second Conference in 1980 was published as Finite Geometries and Designs by Cambridge University Press. The main speakers were A. R. Calderbank, P. J. Cameron, C. E. Praeger, B. Schmidt, H. Van Maldeghem. There were 64 participants and 42 contributions, all listed at the end of the volume. Conference web site http://www. maths. susx. ac. uk/Staff/JWPH/ Why? This collection of 21 articles describes the latest research and current state of the art in the following inter-linked areas: • combinatorial structures in finite projective and affine spaces, also known as Galois geometries, in which combinatorial objects such as blocking sets, spreads and partial spreads, ovoids, arcs and caps, as well as curves and hypersurfaces, are all of interest; • geometric and algebraic coding theory; • finite groups and incidence geometries, as in polar spaces, gener alized polygons and diagram geometries; • algebraic and geometric design theory, in particular designs which have interesting symmetric properties and difference sets, which play an important role, because of their close connections to both Galois geometry and coding theory.

Translation generalized quadrangles play a key role in the theory of generalized quadrangles, comparable to the role of translation planes in the theory of projective and affine planes. The notion of translation generalized quadrangle is a local analogue of the more global OC Moufang ConditionOCO, a topic of great interest, also due to the classification of all Moufang polygons. Attention is thus paid to recent results in that direction, but also many of the most important results in the general theory of generalized quadrangles that appeared since 1984 are treated. Translation Generalized Quadrangles is essentially self-contained, as the reader is only expected to be familiar with some basic facts on finite generalized quadrangles. Proofs that are either too long or too technical are left out, or just sketched. The three standard works on generalized quadrangles are (co-)authored by the writers of this book: OC Finite Generalized QuadranglesOCO (1984) by S E Payne and J A Thas, OC Generalized PolygonsOCO (1998) by H Van Maldeghem, and OC Symmetry in Finite Generalized QuadranglesOCO (2004) by K Thas. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Generalized Quadrangles (127 KB). Contents: Generalized Quadrangles; Regularity, Antiregularity and 3-Regularity; Elation and Translation Generalized Quadrangles; Generalized Quadrangles and Flocks; Good Eggs; Generalized Quadrangles, Nets and the Axiom of Veblen; Ovoids and Subquadrangles; Translation Generalized Ovals; Moufang Sets and Translation Moufang Sets; Configurations of Translation Points; Moufang Quadrangles with a Translation Point; Translation Ovoids in Translation Quadrangles; Translation Generalized Quadrangles in Projective Space; Open Problems. Readership: Researchers in incidence geometry, combinatorics and finite geometries. Also suitable as a textbook for a graduate course.

One of the ultimate goals in Robotics is to create autonomous robots. Such robots will accept high-level descriptions of tasks and will execute them without further human intervention. The input descriptions will specify what the user wants done rather than how to do it. The robots will be any kind of versatile mechanical device equipped with actuators and sensors under the control of a computing system. Making progress toward autonomous robots is of major practical inter est in a wide variety of application domains including manufacturing, construction, waste management, space exploration, undersea work, as sistance for the disabled, and medical surgery. It is also of great technical interest, especially for Computer Science, because it raises challenging and rich computational issues from which new concepts of broad useful ness are likely to emerge. Developing the technologies necessary for autonomous robots is a formidable undertaking with deep interweaved ramifications in auto mated reasoning, perception and control. It raises many important prob lems. One of them - motion planning - is the central theme of this book. It can be loosely stated as follows: How can a robot decide what motions to perform in order to achieve goal arrangements of physical objects? This capability is eminently necessary since, by definition, a robot accomplishes tasks by moving in the real world. The minimum one would expect from an autonomous robot is the ability to plan its x Preface own motions.