Seven men and women, who are immune to nanotechnology, fight machine beings which have been created to destroy what is left of humanity.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development. “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times “Startling in scope and bravado.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “An important book.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near presents a radical and optimistic view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

In a technologically suppressed future, information demands to be free in the debut novel from Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross. In the twenty-first century, life as we know it changed. Faster-than-light travel was perfected, and the Eschaton, a superhuman artificial intelligence, was born. Four hundred years later, the far-flung colonies that arose as a result of these events—scattered over three thousand years of time and a thousand parsecs of space—are beginning to rediscover their origins. The New Republic is one such colony. It has existed for centuries in self-imposed isolation, rejecting all but the most basic technology. Now, under attack by a devastating information plague, the colony must reach out to Earth for help. A battle fleet is dispatched, streaking across the stars to the rescue. But things are not what they seem—secret agendas and ulterior motives abound, both aboard the ship and on the ground. And watching over it all is the Eschaton, which has its own very definite ideas about the outcome...

The field of phase transitions and critical phenomena continues to be active in research, producing a steady stream of interesting and fruitful results. It has moved into a central place in condensed matter studies.Statistical physics, and more specifically, the theory of transitions between states of matter, more or less defines what we know about 'everyday' matter and its transformations.The major aim of this serial is to provide review articles that can serve as standard references for research workers in the field, and for graduate students and others wishing to obtain reliable information on important recent developments.

From the algebraic properties of a complete number field, to the analytic properties imposed by the Cauchy integral formula, to the geometric qualities originating from conformality, Complex Variables: A Physical Approach with Applications and MATLAB explores all facets of this subject, with particular emphasis on using theory in practice. The first five chapters encompass the core material of the book. These chapters cover fundamental concepts, holomorphic and harmonic functions, Cauchy theory and its applications, and isolated singularities. Subsequent chapters discuss the argument principle, geometric theory, and conformal mapping, followed by a more advanced discussion of harmonic functions. The author also presents a detailed glimpse of how complex variables are used in the real world, with chapters on Fourier and Laplace transforms as well as partial differential equations and boundary value problems. The final chapter explores computer tools, including Mathematica®, MapleTM, and MATLAB®, that can be employed to study complex variables. Each chapter contains physical applications drawing from the areas of physics and engineering. Offering new directions for further learning, this text provides modern students with a powerful toolkit for future work in the mathematical sciences.