Stellar Populations with ELTs

The star formation, mass assembly and chemical enrichment histories of galaxies, and their present distributions of dark matter, remain encoded in their stellar populations. Distinguishing the actual distribution functions of stellar age, metallicity and kinematics at several locations in a range of galaxies, sampling across Hubble types and representative environments, is the information required for a robust description of galaxy histories. Achieving this requires large aperture, to provide the sensitivity to reach a range of environs and Hubble types beyond the Local Group, to provide high spatial resolution, since the fields are crowded, and preferably with optical performance since age-sensitivity is greatest near the main-sequence turn-off, and metallicity-sensitivity for these warm stars is greatest in the optical.Comment: IAU Symposium No. 232, eds P. Whitelock, B. Leidundgeit & M. Dennefel

Galactic Bulges

We review current knowledge on the structure, properties and evolution of galactic bulges, considering particularly common preconceptions in the light of recent observational results.Comment: in press, Annual Review Astron. Astrophys. 35 1997. Plain tex, 9 figures included. Also available by anonymous ftp at ftp://ftp.ast.cam.ac.uk/pub/gil

The structure of Hilbert flag varieties

In this paper we present a geometric realization of infinite dimensional analogues of the finite dimensional representations of the general linear group. This requires and etailed analysis of the structure of the flag varieties involved and the line bundles over them. In general the action of the restricted linear group can not be lifted to the line bundles and thus leads to central extensions of this group. It is determined exactly when these extensions are non-trivial. These representations are of importance in quantum field theory and in the framework of integrable systems. As an application, it is shown how the flag varieties occur in the latter context

On hardware for generating routes in Kautz digraphs

In this paper we present a hardware implementation of an algorithm for generating node disjoint routes in a Kautz network. Kautz networks are based on a family of digraphs described by W.H. Kautz[Kautz 68]. A Kautz network with in-degree and out-degree d has N = dk + dk¿1 nodes (for any cardinals d, k>0). The diameter is at most k, the degree is fixed and independent of the network size. Moreover, it is fault-tolerant, the connectivity is d and the mapping of standard computation graphs such as a linear array, a ring and a tree on a Kautz network is straightforward.\ud The network has a simple routing mechanism, even when nodes or links are faulty. Imase et al. [Imase 86] showed the existence of d node disjoint paths between any pair of vertices. In Smit et al. [Smit 91] an algorithm is described that generates d node disjoint routes between two arbitrary nodes in the network. In this paper we present a simple and fast hardware implementation of this algorithm. It can be realized with standard components (Field Programmable Gate Arrays)