Fractals are intricate geometrical forms that contain miniature copies of themselves on ever smaller scales. This colorful book describes methods for producing an endless variety of fractal art using a computer program that searches through millions of equations looking for those few that can produce images having aesthetic appeal. Over a hundred examples of such images are included with a link to the software that produced these images, and can also produce many more similar fractals. The underlying mathematics of the process is also explained in detail.

This is the first-ever book to provide a comprehensive analysis of Chinese social security reforms with a variety of views. It addresses issues such as what kind of social security system China should establish, how this system should be managed and financed, and how the transition from the old system to the new system can best be accomplished. The authors of the papers in this book include internationally renowned Chinese and Western social security experts (such as Martin Feldstein and Henry Aaron), Chinese policy makers, and scholars who have worked on Chinese social security for years

Mergers & Acquisitions and Partnerships in China provides a fast and accessible framework to external growth in China, and is an attempt to accurately describe the main operative conditions and in particular the most common pitfalls for foreign businessmen. The business cases in this book illustrate real business situations, including different outcomes and a thorough analysis of the reasons for success or failure of the case. The authors provide all the necessary tools to better master the negotiation and transaction process, and provide in particular, detailed explanation on the due diligence process and the regulatory framework to help readers successfully lead acquisitions in China. Written by well-known experts in finance, law, and management, who all have deep business knowledge of China, the book aims to help practitioners, such as law firms, audit and advisory firms, and entrepreneurs to start or grow their businesses in China through successful partnerships, and acquisitions and mergers by explaining how these aspects are regulated by a complex web of laws, regulatory, and political practices in a context where the state plays a key role in the approval of important transactions

For the life of a diplomat is often a variation of routine boredom and exhilarating crises". Maurice Baker is an academic and one of Singapore's pioneer diplomats. Growing up in colonial-governed Malaya and Singapore, his profound love for great literature works inspired him to obtain an honors in English from King's college, London in 1948 despite the cruelties faced during and after the Second World War. Baker's humble beginnings and political consciousness earned him the friendship and respect of many diplomats during his missions to India in 1967, Malaysia in 1969, Philippines in 1977 and back to Malaysia in 1980 before retiring from his career as a diplomat in 1988. Between his diplomatic missions, Baker returned to Singapore in 1972 to head the Department of English at the University of Singapore for five years. This is Baker's story of how he came to be The Accidental Diplomat. With occasional poems and a sense of humor, he candidly recounts the colourful romances of his life to his enriching encounters of diplomatic relations. His portrayals of admiration for great leaders and men paint a vivid picture of the qualities that guided his beliefs, proving that he was by no means an "Accidental Diplomat" in the eyes of others

This volume deals with advanced topics in matrix theory using the notions and tools from algebra, analysis, geometry and numerical analysis. It consists of seven chapters that are loosely connected and interdependent. The choice of the topics is very personal and reflects the subjects that the author was actively working on in the last 40 years. Many results appear for the first time in the volume. Readers will encounter various properties of matrices with entries in integral domains, canonical forms for similarity, and notions of analytic, pointwise and rational similarity of matrices with entries which are locally analytic functions in one variable. This volume is also devoted to various properties of operators in inner product space, with tensor products and other concepts in multilinear algebra, and the theory of non-negative matrices. It will be of great use to graduate students and researchers working in pure and applied mathematics, bioinformatics, computer science, engineering, operations research, physics and statistics