Urban Space, Singularity and Networks in Laura Del-Rivo’s The Furnished Room (1961)

This essay explores the representation of interior and exterior urban space in Laura Del-Rivo’s novel The Furnished Room (1961) through the lenses of singularity and networking, which are proposed as preferable alternatives to notions such as individuality and community, especially in the analysis of city life and literature. The essay examines portrayals of four kinds of urban space in the novel – the furnished room, the office, the café and the street – which seem to offer escapes from the perceived constrictions of the family home, the suburb and the Church. It analyses the novel’s sensory evocations of such urban spaces, especially through smell and sight. The essay also considers how the narrative conveys the enticements of the abstract and impersonal network of money. It relates these elements to its young male protagonist, an existentialist (anti-)hero who suffers from a recurrent sense of unreality and who seeks a more sustained version of the greater intensity glimpsed in epiphanies, privileged moments in which the world seems temporarily transfigured into a visionary space. The essay suggests that the novel respects but questions his quest by dramatizing his wrong choices and by ending with a view of urban space given over to women and children.

Local Kinematic Analysis of Closed-Loop Linkages—Mobility, Singularities, and Shakiness

The mobility of a linkage is determined by the constraints imposed on its members. The geometric constraints define the configuration space (c-space) variety as the geometric entity in which the finite mobility of a linkage is encoded. The aim of a local kinematic analysis of a linkage is to deduce its finite mobility, in a given configuration, from the local c-space geometry. In this paper, a method for the local analysis is presented adopting the concept of the tangent cone to a variety. The latter is an algebraic variety approximating the c-space. It allows for investigating the mobility in regular as well as singular configurations. The instantaneous mobility is determined by the constraints, rather than by the c-space geometry. Shaky and underconstrained linkages are prominent examples that exhibit a permanently higher instantaneous than finite DOF even in regular configurations. Kinematic singularities, on the other hand, are reflected in a change of the instantaneous DOF. A c-space singularity as a kinematic singularity, but a kinematic singularity may be a regular point of the c-space. The presented method allows to identify c-space singularities. It also reveals the ith-order mobility and allows for a classification of linkages as overconstrained and underconstrained. The method is applicable to general multiloop linkages with lower pairs. It is computationally simple and only involves Lie brackets (screw products) of instantaneous joint screws. The paper also summarizes the relevant kinematic phenomena of linkages.

Periodic Problem Involving Quasilinear Differential Operator and Weak Singularity

We study the singular periodic boundary value problem of the form(|u′|where 1 < p < ∞ and f ∈ Car([0, T] × (0,∞)) can have a repulsive space singularity at x = 0. Contrary to previous results by Mawhin and Jebelean, Liu Bing and Rachůnková and Tvrdý, we need not assume any strong force conditions. Our main existence results rely on a new antimaximum principle for periodic quasilinear periodic problem, which has an independent meaning.

Imperfect bifurcation and Banach space singularity theory

This paper generalizes the theory of imperfect bifurcation via singularity theory as developed by M. Golubitsky and D. Schaeffer to a Banach space setting. Like the parameter-free potential catastrophe theory, where similar generalizations have been discussed in the literature, Banach control spaces allow useful uniform control of function parameters through the universal unfolding. Among the results are tests for various germ properties and discussion of their reducibility under a Liapunov—Schmidt type splitting, as well as a generalization of the finite dimensional unfolding and germ classification theory.