Book Review: Humanizing Freud

FREUD: A LIFE FOR OUR TIME Peter Gay, Ph.D. W.W. Norton & Company New York, 1988 651 pages $25.0

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy with capecitabine and temozolomide for unresectable pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.

Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs) are relatively rare tumors that arise in the endocrine cells of the pancreas. Historically, somatostatin analogues have been used in this disease primarily for symptom control and, to a limited extent, disease stability. More recently, sunitinib and everolimus have been approved for advanced stage PNETs based on a survival benefit. However, both agents have a <10% actual response rate and cause nontrivial side effect profiles that limit duration of therapy. In locally advanced disease, there is a paucity of data to support an optimal neoadjuvant approach with the expectation of down-staging to allow for curative resection. We describe in this case a young woman who was successfully down-staged using a chemotherapy regimen of capecitabine and temozolomide with minimal toxicity

Polyhedral graph abstractions and an approach to the Linear Hirsch Conjecture

We introduce a new combinatorial abstraction for the graphs of polyhedra. The new abstraction is a flexible framework defined by combinatorial properties, with each collection of properties taken providing a variant for studying the diameters of polyhedral graphs. One particular variant has a diameter which satisfies the best known upper bound on the diameters of polyhedra. Another variant has superlinear asymptotic diameter, and together with some combinatorial operations, gives a concrete approach for disproving the Linear Hirsch Conjecture.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure

Chaotic dynamics of the Bianchi IX universe in Gauss-Bonnet gravity

We investigate the dynamics of closed FRW universe and anisotropic Bianchi type-IX universe characterized by two scale factors in a gravity theory including a higher curvature (Gauss-Bonnet) term. The presence of the cosmological constant creates a critical point of saddle type in the phase space of the system. An orbit starting from a neighborhood of the separatrix will evolve toward the critical point, and it eventually either expands to the de Sitter space or collapses to the big crunch. In the closed FRW model, the dynamics is reduced to hyperbolic motions in the two-dimensional center manifold, and the system is not chaotic. In the anisotropic model, anisotropy introduces the rotational mode, which interacts with the hyperbolic mode to present a cylindrical structure of unstable periodic orbits in the neighborhood of the critical point. Due to the non-integrability of the system, the interaction of rotational and hyperbolic modes makes the system chaotic, making it impossible for us to predict the final fate of the universe. We find that the chaotic dynamics arises from the fact that orbits with even small perturbations around the separatrix oscillate in the neighborhood of the critical point before finally expanding or collapsing. The chaotic character is also evidenced by the fractal structures in the basins of attraction.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, REVTex

Combinatorics and Geometry of Transportation Polytopes: An Update

A transportation polytope consists of all multidimensional arrays or tables of non-negative real numbers that satisfy certain sum conditions on subsets of the entries. They arise naturally in optimization and statistics, and also have interest for discrete mathematics because permutation matrices, latin squares, and magic squares appear naturally as lattice points of these polytopes. In this paper we survey advances on the understanding of the combinatorics and geometry of these polyhedra and include some recent unpublished results on the diameter of graphs of these polytopes. In particular, this is a thirty-year update on the status of a list of open questions last visited in the 1984 book by Yemelichev, Kovalev and Kravtsov and the 1986 survey paper of Vlach.Comment: 35 pages, 13 figure