With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.

Written in 1941--42, these highlights capture the excitement of newspaper life in the heyday of print journalism.

Among the most dramatic problems faced on the Italian peninsula in the fourteenth century were the raids of marauding mercenary companies. These companies, known locally as Companies of Adventure and more generally as Free Companies, were private armies, composed of professional soldiers and adventurers from throughout Europe. They sold their services to the highest bidder in times of war, and staged ruinous raids in times of peace. The city of Siena, visually opulent and wedged between Florence and the lands of the pope -- two frequent employers of mercenaries -- was an especial target.

In this groundbreaking volume, William Caferro explores the social, economic and administrative impact of the companies on Siena from the arrival of Werner of Urslingen and the Great Company in 1342 until the fall of the Sienese republic in 1399. During this time, Caferro explains, Siena endured some thirty-seven raids, characterized by arson, pillage, and looting in the countryside and extortion of enormous bribes from the city government. He shows that the raids constituted a persistent and significant drain on both the human and financial resources of Siena. Payments to the companies siphoned off valuable (and limited) funds, damaging an already circumscribed economy, while the government was forced to borrow money on an unprecedented scale from its citizens. Sienese officials pressed money out of every available resource, including the Church (which had previously been taxed only sporadically) and Jews (who were belatedly granted the "right" to lend money to the state). Other desperate measures included pawning land, forcing purchases of salt, and readmitting exiles for a fee. The stresses caused by the mercenaries were greatly exacerbated by plague and famine, which often coincided precisely with the raids -- each disaster serving to intensify the effects of the other.

Caferro concludes that the stress of the companies acted as an agent of change on the machinery of state, bringing both decentralization and confusion. If, as some historians have argued, military expenditure led to more streamlined bureaucracies and helped "make" states elsewhere, it is nonetheless clear that the same phenomenon helped "unmake" Siena. The raids, therefore, were more than an exotic nuisance, but a key factor in Siena's decision to abandon independence in 1399.

A.N. Kolmogorov (b. Tambov 1903, d. Moscow 1987) was one of the most brilliant mathematicians that the world has ever known. Incredibly deep and creative, he was able to approach each subject with a completely new point of view: in a few magnificent pages, which are models of shrewdness and imagination, and which astounded his contemporaries, he changed drastically the landscape of the subject.

Most mathematicians prove what they can, Kolmogorov was of those who prove what they want. For this book several world experts were asked to present one part of the mathematical heritage left to us by Kolmogorov.

Each chapter treats one of Kolmogorov's research themes, or a subject that was invented as a consequence of his discoveries. His contributions are presented, his methods, the perspectives he opened to us, the way in which this research has evolved up to now, along with examples of recent applications and a presentation of the current prospects.

This book can be read by anyone with a master's (even a bachelor's) degree in mathematics, computer science or physics, or more generally by anyone who likes mathematical ideas. Rather than present detailed proofs, the main ideas are described. A bibliography is provided for those who wish to understand the technical details.

One can see that sometimes very simple reasoning (with the right interpretation and tools) can lead in a few lines to very substantial results.

The Kolmogorov Legacy in Physics was published by Springer in 2004 (ISBN 978-3-540-20307-0).

Zipf's law is one of the few quantitative reproducible regularities found in economics. It states that, for most countries, the size distributions of cities and of firms are power laws with a specific exponent: the number of cities and of firms with sizes greater than S is inversely proportional to S. Zipf's law also holds in many other scientific fields. Most explanations start with Gibrat's law of proportional growth (also known as "preferential attachment'' in the application to network growth) but need to incorporate additional constraints and ingredients introducing deviations from it. This book presents a general theoretical derivation of Zipf's law, providing a synthesis and extension of previous approaches. The general theory is presented in the language of firm dynamics for the sake of convenience but applies to many other systems. It takes into account (i) time-varying firm creation, (ii) firm's exit resulting from both a lack of sufficient capital and sudden external shocks, (iii) the coupling between firm's birth rate and the growth of the value of the population of firms. The robustness of Zipf's law is understood from the approximate validity of a general balance condition. A classification of the mechanisms responsible for deviations from Zipf's law is also offered.

TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPLEMENT

Journeying through time, THE STORY OF NUMBERS explores the history of mathematics to trace the rise of various number sysems in cultures from Mesopotamia to the modern Computer Era. John McLeish reveals how these number systems in turn have shaped the cultures that devised them. From the secrets and the beauty of the Mayan calendar, to Arabaian algebra, the Chinese counting board, from Pythagoras to Newton to Boole, McLeish uncovers the human side of numbers, who used them and how they have shaped our world.