Joachim Reinhardt

We are pleased by the positive resonance of our book which now necessitates a fourth edition. We have used this opportunity to implement corrections of misprints and amendments at several places, and to extend and improve the discussion of many of the exercises and examples. We hope that our presentation of the method of equivalent photons (Example 3. 17), the form factor of the electron (Example 5. 7), the infrared catastrophe (Example 5. 8) and the energy shift of atomic levels (Example 5. 9)arenow even better to understand. The new Exercise 5. 10 shows in detail how to arrive at the non-relativistic limit for the calculation of form factors. Moreover, we have brought up-to-date the Biographical Notes about physicists who have contributed to the dev- opment of quantum electrodynamics, and references to experimental tests of the t- ory. For example, there has been recent progress in the determination of the electric and magnetic form factors of the proton (discussed in Exercise 3. 5 on the Rosenbluth formula) and the Lamb shift of high-Z atoms (discussed in Example 5. 9 on the energy shift of atomic levels), while the experimental veri cation of the birefringence of the QED vacuum in a strong magnetic eld (Example 7. 8) remains unsettled and is a topic of active ongoing research.

Neural Networks presents concepts of neural-network models and techniques of parallel distributed processing in a three-step approach: - A brief overview of the neural structure of the brain and the history of neural-network modeling introduces to associative memory, preceptrons, feature-sensitive networks, learning strategies, and practical applications. - The second part covers subjects like statistical physics of spin glasses, the mean-field theory of the Hopfield model, and the "space of interactions" approach to the storage capacity of neural networks. - The final part discusses nine programs with practical demonstrations of neural-network models. The software and source code in C are on a 3 1/2" MS-DOS diskette can be run with Microsoft, Borland, Turbo-C, or compatible compilers.