Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian playwright and short story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theater. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career- ""Medicine is my lawful wife,"" he once said, ""and literature is my mistress.""Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov'sUncle Vanyaand premiered his last two plays,Three SistersandThe Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a ""theatre of mood"" and a ""submerged life in the text.""Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.Anton Chekhov was the author of hundreds of short stories and several plays and is regarded by many as both the greatest Russian storyteller and the father of modern drama. Avrahm Yarmolinsky(January 13, 1890-September 28, 1975) was an author, translator, and teacher. Yarmolinsky primarily taught at Columbia University and City College of New York. His books include, Dostoievsky, A Life, A Treasury of Russian Verse, and The Russian Literary Imagination.
Spline functions arise in a number of fields: statistics, computer graphics, programming, computer-aided design technology, numerical analysis, and other areas of applied mathematics. Much work has focused on approximating splines such as B-splines and Bezier splines. In contrast, this book emphasizes interpolating splines. Almost always, the cubic polynomial form is treated in depth. Interpolating Cubic Splines covers a wide variety of explicit approaches to designing splines for the interpolation of points in the plane by curves, and the interpolation of points in 3-space by surfaces. These splines include various estimated-tangent Hermite splines and double-tangent splines, as well as classical natural splines and geometrically-continuous splines such as beta-splines and n-splines. A variety of special topics are covered, including monotonic splines, optimal smoothing splines, basis representations, and exact energy-minimizing physical splines. An in-depth review of the differential geometry of curves and a broad range of exercises, with selected solutions, and complete computer programs for several forms of splines and smoothing splines, make this book useful for a broad audience: students, applied mathematicians, statisticians, engineers, and practicing programmers involved in software development in computer graphics, CAD, and various engineering applications. <p>--Zentralblatt Math