A two-bridge knot (or link) can be characterized by the so-called Schubert normal form Kp, q where p and q are positive coprime integers. Associated to Kp, q there are the Conway polynomial ▽kp, q(z) and the normalized Alexander polynomial Δkp, q(t). However, it has been open problem how ▽kp, q(z) and Δkp, q(t) are expressed in terms of p and q. In this note, we will give explicit formulae for the Conway polynomials and the normalized Alexander polynomials in the case of two-bridge knots and links. This is done using elementary number theoretical functions in p and q.

We characterize least-perimeter enclosures of prescribed area on some piecewise smooth manifolds, including certain polyhedra, double spherical caps, and cylindrical cans.

We introduce sign-preserving charges on the system of all orthogonally closed subspaces, F(S), of an inner product space S, and we show that it is always bounded on all the finite-dimensional subspaces whenever dim S = ∞. When S is finite-dimensional this is not true. This fact is used for a new completeness criterion showing that S is complete whenever F(S) admits at least one non-zero sign-preserving regular charge. In particular, every such charge is always completely additive.

Some new random coincidence point and random fixed point theorems for multivalued mappings in separable complete metric spaces are proved. The results presented in this paper are the stochastic versions of corresponding results of Chang and Peng and extend the result of the author.

In this article we study some special problems of the additive number theory connected with an estimate of cardinality of a sum of two sets, which can be convex as well as non-convex sequences.

In this paper, we generalize the Kučera's group-determinant formulae to obtain the real and relative class number formulae of any subfield of cyclotomic function fields with arbitrary conductor in the form of a product of determinants. From these formulae, we generalize the relative class number formula of Rosen and Bae-Kang and obtain analogous results of Tsumura and Hirabayashi for an intermediate field in the tower of cyclotomic function fields with prime power conductor.

The Archimedean components of triangular norms (which turn the closed unit interval into anabelian, totally ordered semigroup with neutral element 1) are studied, in particular their extension to triangular norms, and some construction methods for Archimedean components are given. The triangular norms which are uniquely determined by their Archimedean components are characterized. Using ordinal sums and additive generators, new types of left-continuous triangular norms are constructed.

We develop several iterative methods for computing generalized inverses using both first and second order optimization methods in C*-algebras. Known steepest descent iterative methods are generalized in C*-algebras. We introduce second order methods based on the minimization of the norms ‖Ax − b‖2 and ‖x‖2 by means of the known second order unconstrained minimization methods. We give several examples which illustrate our theory.

This paper presents two natural extensions of the topology of the space of scalar meromorphic functions M(Ω) described by Grosse-Erdmann in 1995 to spaces of vector-valued meromorphic functions M(ΩE). When E is locally complete and does not contain copies of ω we compare these topologies with the topology induced by the representation M (Ω, E) ≃ M(Ω)ε E recently obtained by Bonet, Maestre and the author.

We show that, for any positive integer k, there are only finitely many finite groups, up to isomorphism, with exactly k conjugacy classes of elements of prime power order. This generalizes a result of E. Landau from 1903. The proof of our generalization makes use of the classification of finite simple groups.