System Analysis and Management

A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.

In terms of the quantum theory, a system is defined as a collection of bands corresponding to a common transition between two major electron levels. Sets of bands in a system can be selected such that the frequency intervals between successive bands in the set change in an arithmetic progression. These sets can be chosen in two different ways, the frequency intervals increasing in opposite directions in the two sets. Deslandres, who did the pioneer work in this field, called one series of such sets " first progressions," and the other series " second progressions." An entire system of bands, often eighty or more in number, can thus be represented as a function of two parameters p and n. The parameter n varies in a first progression, p remaining constant. The parameter p varies in a second progression, n remaining constant.

[A]t the close of the Middle Ages, when the so-called Arabic figures became established throughout Europe with the symbol 0 and the principle of local value, immediate progress was made in the art of reckoning. The problems... led up to the general solutions of equations of the third and fourth degree by the Italian mathematicians of the sixteenth century. Yet even these discoveries were made in somewhat the same manner as problems in mental arithmetic are now solved in common schools; for the present signs of plus, minus, and equality, the radical and exponential signs, and especially the systematic use of letters for denoting general quantities in algebra, had not yet become universal. The last step was definitively due to... Vieta... and the mighty advancement of analysis resulting therefrom can hardly be measured or imagined.