Groups are important because they measure symmetry. This text, designed for undergraduate mathematics students, provides a gentle introduction to the highlights of elementary group theory. Written in an informal style, the material is divided into short sections each of which deals with an important result or a new idea.

Throughout the book, the emphasis is placed on concrete examples, many of them geometrical in nature, so that finite rotation groups and the seventeen wallpaper groups are tr...

The most famous designs of the twentieth century are not those in museums, but in the marketplace. the Coca-Cola bottle and the McDonalds logo are known all over the world, and designs like the modernistic Frankfurt Kitchen of 1926, or the 1954 streamlined and tail-finned Oldsmobile, or Blow, the inflatable chair ubiquitous in the late sixties, tell us more about our culture than a narrowly-defined canon of classics. Drawing on the most up-to-date scholarship (not only in design history but a...

Major accidents are rare events due to the many barriers, safeguards and defences developed by modern technologies. But they continue to happen with saddening regularity and their human and financial consequences are all too often unacceptably catastrophic. One of the greatest challenges we face is to develop more effective ways of both understanding and limiting their occurrence.

This lucid book presents a set of common principles to further our knowledge of the causes of major accidents in ...