The Algebraist

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This was only one of several papers that Milnor published in 1953. The others were: The characteristics of a vector field on the two-sphere; On total curvatures of closed space curves; and (with Israel Herstein ) An axiomatic approach to measurable utility. Another paper, Link groups, was published in 1954 but it had been submitted for publication in March 1952, over a year before the first of the 1953 papers just mentioned. Milnor writes in the Introduction to Link groups:- It's not the word count that's the problem, although the glut of information dilutes the emotional impact of some of the dramatic turns, but that the author's personality - cheery, optimistic, absurd-aware - is so strong it drowns out chances for genuine pathos. Even in the face of some truly awful atrocities the reader remains aware that events are completely subject to the cosy demands of the narrative, not the other way around. The Algebraist marks a return to the happy hunting grounds of Banks's early SF, replete with all the whizzy boys' toys, wildly improbable extreme sports, damning character assassinations and good-humoured condemnation of all that's wearying about humanity. The Culture, the great civilisation of many of his previous SF novels, is absent, but it's been replaced by a baroque sweep of aliens in capitalist overdrive, providing more than adequate fuel for the author's twin obsessions of sociopolitics and having fun, the two always riding hand in glove, switching with enviable effortlessness between the intimate and the cosmic.

The Algebraist - Wikipedia

By a link homotopy is meant a deformation of one link onto another, during which each component of the link is allowed to cross itself, but such that no two components are allowed to intersect. The purpose of this paper is to study links under the relation of homotopy. The fundamental tool in this study will be the link group. The link group of a link is a factor group of the fundamental group of its complement, which is invariant under homotopy. ... I am indebted to R H Fox for assistance in the preparation of this paper. He began research at Princeton after graduating with his B.A. and, in 1953, before completing his doctoral studies, he was appointed to the faculty in Princeton. While undertaking research he enjoyed playing games in the common room. In particular he played Kriegspiel (a game of blindfold chess ), Go and Nash (a game invented by John Nash and now called Hex ). In fact John Nash was at Princeton during these years and Milnor and Nash often talked about game theory. Milnor's next paper, written while he was undertaking research, was Sums of positional games (1953). Milnor writes in the Introduction:- For those not acquainted with large-scale SF, The Algebraist is a perfect place to have your mind blown to smithereens with all that its vast canvas delivers. In particular, if you're used to the less ambitious and necessarily less physically astonishing pleasures of contemporary fiction, you might want to take out insurance on the integrity of your skull.

J Milnor, Growing up in the old Fine Hall, in Prospects in Mathematics (Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 1999), 1- 11, E H Brown, Review: Topology from the differentiable viewpoint, by John Willard Milnor, Amer. Math. Monthly 74 (4) (1967), 461.

Algebraist - Wikipedia Algebraist - Wikipedia

An enormously enjoyable book, full of wonderful aliens, a sense of wonder and subtle political commentary on current events.”– Publishers Weekly(Starred Review) N H Kuiper, Review: Morse theory, by John Willard Milnor, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 71 (1) (1965), 136- 137. E H Spanier, Review: Characteristic classes, by John Willard Milnor and James D Stasheff, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 81 (5) (1975), 862- 866. For a good overview of Milnor's mathematics, see the citations for the various prizes which he has won at THIS LINK. J Hubbard, Review: Dynamics in one complex variable, by John Willard Milnor, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S. ) 38 (4) (2001), 495- 498.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Iain Banks came to controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. Consider Phlebas, his first science fiction novel, was published under the name Iain M. Banks in 1987. He is now widely acclaimed as one of the most powerful, innovative and exciting writers of his generation.