Roy Ranjan

This thorough work presents the fundamental results of modular function theory as developed during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It features beautiful formulas and derives them using skillful and ingenious manipulations, especially classical methods often overlooked today. Starting with the work of Gauss, Abel, and Jacobi, the book then discusses the attempt by Dedekind to construct a theory of modular functions independent of elliptic functions. The latter part of the book explains how Hurwitz completed this task and includes one of Hurwitz's landmark papers, translated by the author, and delves into the work of Ramanujan, Mordell, and Hecke. For graduate students and experts in modular forms, this book demonstrates the relevance of these original sources and thereby provides the reader with new insights into contemporary work in this area.

Special functions, natural generalizations of the elementary functions, have been studied for centuries. The greatest mathematicians, among them Euler, Gauss, Legendre, Eisenstein, Riemann, and Ramanujan, have laid the foundations for this beautiful and useful area of mathematics. This treatise presents an overview of special functions, focusing primarily on hypergeometric functions and the associated hypergeometric series, including Bessel functions and classical orthogonal polynomials, using the basic building block of the gamma function. In addition to relatively new work on gamma and beta functions, such as Selberg's multidimensional integrals, many important but relatively unknown nineteenth century results are included. Other topics include q-extensions of beta integrals and of hypergeometric series, Bailey chains, spherical harmonics, and applications to combinatorial problems. The authors provide organizing ideas, motivation, and historical background for the study and application of some important special functions. This clearly expressed and readable work can serve as a learning tool and lasting reference for students and researchers in special functions, mathematical physics, differential equations, mathematical computing, number theory, and combinatorics.

Family therapy is one of the most widely practised psychotherapies in North America. Roy and Frankel here provide a comprehensive and critical reassessment of the research literature regarding the efficacy of this form of treatment. The main thesis of the book is that this research is still in its infancy and that, although important contributions have been made, much work remains to be done.The book is divided into three parts. The first offers an overview of the current state of the family therapy field. The second assesses outcome studies of family therapy on the basis of light-stage issues. It examines the literature on family treatment with children, adolescents, and adults. The third part reviews the outcome of a host of problems treated by this method: psychosomatic and medical conditions, alcoholism, anorexia nervoa, drug addiction, and placement prevention in child welfare. The authors conclude by reviewing the state of the art in the field and defining future directions for research.

Chronic back pain and migraine headaches plague millions of North Americans. Over the past twenty years these and other forms of chronic benign pain have been recognized as serious afflictions that affect a significant segment of the adult population. Researchers have investigated the various medical and psychological aspects of chronic benign pain; now Ranjan Roy adds a critical new dimension with study of the social forces that determine the lives of these patients and their responses to their condition. The effects of chronic pain on a patient's social system can be devastating. Roy discusses the extent to which the negative consequences can be reduced, even if the pain itself remains impervious to treatment. He considers a range of interventions that can significantly modify the negative effects of chronic pain, and discusses some of these in detail to enable clinicians to implement them.