Book Reviews: Topology of Surfaces, Knots and Manifolds / Applied Stochastic Modelling / Introduction to Statistical Quality Control

A selection of book reviews by UK academics including: …Topology of Surfaces, Knots and Manifolds by Stephan C Carlson, Wiley 2001 ISBN 0-471-35544-5. Reviewed by John Baylis: This is a book organized into five main chapters of “appealing….ideas and problems involving curves, surfaces and knots”, together with an introductory chapter in which ‘rubber sheet’ geometry is reviewed and the process of increasing the formality and precision of intuitive ideas is begun. This additional precision involves the compactness condition for the surfaces to be studied (surface includes its boundary), the definition of continuous deformation (bicontinuous bijection), and the Euclidean metric for Rn (for n=1,2,3 and sometimes 4). Also introduced in this chapter is the idea of plane diagrams of cylinder, torus, Mobius strip with their associated edge and vertex labelling. The diagrams are attractive and helpful, and should encourage students to draw their own or even construct some of the surfaces. Further reinforcement of the topological differences between these surfaces comes from the idea of playing tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses to us) on the surface of a torus or Klein bottle…/…Applied Stochastic Modelling by Byron J T Morgan, 2000, Arnold, London. 227p plus apps ISBN 0-340-74041-8. Reviewed by Jim Kay: This is a recent addition to the excellent and highly-affordable Arnold Texts in Statistics series. The material has grown out of a thirty-hour lecture course given by the author and it is aimed at final-year undergraduate and MSc students and also as a source of reference on modern statistical meth