This is a companion book to "The Curse of 1920" by Gary Naler. He presents why men have beards and women dressed modestly and covered their heads for 2,000 years.

Let's learn all about the different types of animal coverings! Frogs, salamanders, and humans are covered in skin. Actually, did you know that every animal with a backbone has some type of skin covering its body? Discover all the incredible ways that skin helps animals survive. With amazing photos and lively text, this book explains how skin helps animals stay dry, keep warm, protect themselves, breathe, and more! Get ready to learn all about skin! ABOUT THE SERIES: Animals have different body coverings for different reasons. Some animals use their coverings to keep warm or stay cool, others use them for protection, and can either stand out or blend in. Some animals even use their coverings to move! This vibrant new set of Learn About books gives readers a close-up look at five different animal coverings, from fur and feathers to skin, scales, and shells. Each book is packed with photographs and fun facts that explore how each covering suits the habitat, diet, survival, and life cycle of various animals in the natural world.

This work studies abelian branched coverings of smooth complex projective surfaces from the topological viewpoint. Geometric information about the coverings (such as the first Betti numbers of a smooth model or intersections of embedded curves) is related to topological and combinatorial information about the base space and branch locus. Special attention is given to examples in which the base space is the complex projective plane and the branch locus is a configuration of lines.

Essays develop the elementary theory of Artin Braid groups geometrically and via homotopy theory, discuss the link between knot theory and the combinatorics of braid groups through Markou's Theorem and investigate polynomial covering maps.

The first part of this book provides an elementary and self-contained exposition of classical Galois theory and its applications to questions of solvability of algebraic equations in explicit form. The second part describes a surprising analogy between the fundamental theorem of Galois theory and the classification of coverings over a topological space. The third part contains a geometric description of finite algebraic extensions of the field of meromorphic functions on a Riemann surface and provides an introduction to the topological Galois theory developed by the author. All results are presented in the same elementary and self-contained manner as classical Galois theory, making this book both useful and interesting to readers with a variety of backgrounds in mathematics, from advanced undergraduate students to researchers.

A translation surface is obtained by taking plane polygons and gluing their edges by translations. We ask which subgroups of the Veech group of a primitive translation surface can be realised via a translation covering. For many primitive surfaces we prove that partition stabilising congruence subgroups are the Veech group of a covering surface. We also address the coverings via their monodromy groups and present examples of cyclic coverings in short orbits, i.e. with large Veech groups.

In this up-to-date review and guide to most recent literature, the expert authors develop concepts related to quasiperiodic coverings and describe results. The text describes specific systems in 2 and 3 dimensions with many illustrations, and analyzes the atomic positions in quasicrystals.