Las Vegas and Houston: Global Command Centers in the Sun Belt

Apart from their notoriously hot summers, Las Vegas, Nevada and Houston, Texas appear to have little in common. Upon further scrutiny, however, the two cities have followed strikingly parallel trajectories. As a hub of commercial gaming today, Las Vegas faces challenges comparable to the obstacles Houston encountered in the 1970s and 1980s as a hub of oil and energy. The story of Houston since this downtime reflects a stunning transformation into a modern-day international city, and one that both parallels and portends a new Las Vegas. In this article, we argue that Houston provides a viable model for Las Vegas as a “global command center” of a major international industry – and that in many ways Las Vegas is already following this path

The image of the heat kernel transform on Riemannian symmetric spaces of the noncompact type

The heat kernel or Bargmann-Segal transform on a noncompact Riemannian symmetric space X=G/K maps a square integrable function on X to a holomorphic function on the complex crown. In this article we determine the range of this transform.Comment: Expanded version. Two new sections added in order to clarify two remarks in the previous verson. 15