This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the China-Japan Joint Conference on Computational Geometry, Graphs and Applications, CGGA 2010, held in Dalian, China, in November 2010. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from numerous submissions. All aspects of computational and discrete geometry, graph theory, graph algorithms, and their applications are covered.

Based on a graduate course given at the Technische Universität, Berlin, these lectures present a wealth of material on the modern theory of convex polytopes. The clear and straightforward presentation features many illustrations, and provides complete proofs for most theorems. The material requires only linear algebra as a prerequisite, but takes the reader quickly from the basics to topics of recent research, including a number of unanswered questions. The lectures - introduce the basic facts about polytopes, with an emphasis on the methods that yield the results (Fourier-Motzkin elimination, Schlegel diagrams, shellability, Gale transforms, and oriented matroids) - discuss important examples and elegant constructions (cyclic and neighborly polytopes, zonotopes, Minkowski sums, permutahedra and associhedra, fiber polytopes, and the Lawrence construction) - show the excitement of current work in the field (Kalai's new diameter bounds, construction of non-rational polytopes, the Bohne-Dress tiling theorem, the upper-bound theorem), and nonextendable shellings) They should provide interesting and enjoyable reading for researchers as well as students.

The aim of this book is to introduce the reader to the geometric theory of algebraic varieties, in particular to the birational geometry of algebraic varieties. This volume grew out of the author's book in Japanese published in 3 volumes by Iwanami, Tokyo, in 1977. While writing this English version, the author has tried to rearrange and rewrite the original material so that even beginners can read it easily without referring to other books, such as textbooks on commutative algebra. The reader is only expected to know the definition of Noetherin rings and the statement of the Hilbert basis theorem. The new chapters 1, 2, and 10 have been expanded. In particular, the exposition of D-dimension theory, although shorter, is more complete than in the old version. However, to keep the book of manageable size, the latter parts of Chapters 6, 9, and 11 have been removed. I thank Mr. A. Sevenster for encouraging me to write this new version, and Professors K. K. Kubota in Kentucky and P. M. H. Wilson in Cam bridge for their careful and critical reading of the English manuscripts and typescripts. I held seminars based on the material in this book at The University of Tokyo, where a large number of valuable comments and suggestions were given by students Iwamiya, Kawamata, Norimatsu, Tobita, Tsushima, Maeda, Sakamoto, Tsunoda, Chou, Fujiwara, Suzuki, and Matsuda.

Als ich 1945 in MUnster zu studieren begann, war van dec Waerdens "Mo- deme Algebra" eines dec wenigen Bticher, die ich mir in diesen schwierigen Zeiten leihen konnte. Wie vielen Studenten so war also auch mir . ,dervan dec Waerden" vertraut von Anfang des Studiums an. lch lernte van dec Waerden einige Jahre spaler kennen, und er sagte miT, wie merkwiirdig es sei, daB alle Mathematiker ibn wegen dieses Buches kennen, das Vorlesungen von Emil Artin und Emmy Noether benutzt, wahrend seine wirklichen mathemati- schen Leistungen gam woanders Uigen. In dem Gesprach zeigte sich dann, dall van dec Waerden seine Arheiten zur algebraischen Geometrie nnd insbe- sondere die in den Mathematischen Annalen erschienene Reihe "Zur alge- braischen Geometrie" 1 die es in weiteren Jahren his zur NT. 20 bringen sollte, fUr das Wichtigste hielt. (Etwa 30 Jahre spater war ich zu einem Essen zu Ehren der Trager des Ordens Pour Ie Merite fUr Wissenschaft und Kunste ein- geladen. Die beiden Ordenstrager van der Waerden und Elias Canetti unter- hielten sich. Canetti bedauerte, dall man ibn hauptsachlich wegen seines Bu- ches ,. Die gerettete Zunge" kenne, wahrend andere Schriften doch viet wich- tiger seien. Van der Waerden rief aus "Aber mir geht es doch gaOl genau so mit meinem Algebra-Buch". ) Van der Waerden ist ein so ungewohnlich vielseitiger Mathematiker mit bedeutenden Buchem und Arbeiten aus zahlreichen weit von einander ent* fernten Gebieten, dal3 die Entscheidung des Verlages, diese Setecta der alge- braischen Geometrie zu widmen, sicberlich nicht selbstverstiindlich war.

In the early years of the 1980s, while I was visiting the Institute for Ad vanced Study (lAS) at Princeton as a postdoctoral member, I got a fascinating view, studying congruence modulo a prime among elliptic modular forms, that an automorphic L-function of a given algebraic group G should have a canon ical p-adic counterpart of several variables. I immediately decided to find out the reason behind this phenomenon and to develop the theory of ordinary p-adic automorphic forms, allocating 10 to 15 years from that point, putting off the intended arithmetic study of Shimura varieties via L-functions and Eisenstein series (for which I visited lAS). Although it took more than 15 years, we now know (at least conjecturally) the exact number of variables for a given G, and it has been shown that this is a universal phenomenon valid for holomorphic automorphic forms on Shimura varieties and also for more general (nonholomorphic) cohomological automorphic forms on automorphic manifolds (in a markedly different way). When I was asked to give a series of lectures in the Automorphic Semester in the year 2000 at the Emile Borel Center (Centre Emile Borel) at the Poincare Institute in Paris, I chose to give an exposition of the theory of p-adic (ordinary) families of such automorphic forms p-adic analytically de pending on their weights, and this book is the outgrowth of the lectures given there."

The lectures contained in this book were presented at Harvard University in June 1979. The workshop at which they were presented was the third such on algebro-geometric methods. The first was held in 1973 in London and the emphasis was largely on geometric methods. The second was held at Ames Research Center-NASA in 1976. There again the emphasis was on geometric methods, but algebraic geometry was becoming a dominant theme. In the two years after the Ames meeting there was tremendous growth in the applications of algebraic geometry to systems theory and it was becoming clear that much of the algebraic systems theory was very closely related to the geometric systems theory. On this basis we felt that this was the right time to devote a workshop to the applications of algebra and algebraic geometry to linear systems theory. The lectures contained in this volume represent all but one of the tutorial lectures presented at the workshop. The lec ture of Professor Murray Wonham is not contained in this volume and we refer the interested to the archival literature. This workshop was jointly sponsored by a grant from Ames Research Center-NASA and a grant from the Advanced Study Institute Program of NATO. We greatly appreciate the financial support rendered by these two organizations. The American Mathematical Society hosted this meeting as part of their Summer Seminars in Applied Mathematics and will publish the companion volume of con tributed papers."

Classical valuation theory has applications in number theory and class field theory as well as in algebraic geometry, e.g. in a divisor theory for curves. But the noncommutative equivalent is mainly applied to finite dimensional skewfields. Recently however, new types of algebras have become popular in modern algebra; Weyl algebras, deformed and quantized algebras, quantum groups and Hopf algebras, etc. The advantage of valuation theory in the commutative case is that it allows effective calculations, bringing the arithmetical properties of the ground field into the picture. This arithmetical nature is also present in the theory of maximal orders in central simple algebras. Firstly, we aim at uniting maximal orders, valuation rings, Dubrovin valuations, etc. in a common theory, the theory of primes of algebras. Secondly, we establish possible applications of the noncommutative arithmetics to interesting classes of algebras, including the extension of central valuations to nice classes of quantized algebras, the development of a theory of Hopf valuations on Hopf algebras and quantum groups, noncommutative valuations on the Weyl field and interesting rings of invariants and valuations of Gauss extensions.

Approach your problems from the right end It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is and begin with the answers. Then one day, that they can't see the problem. perhaps you will find the final question. G. K. Chesterton. The Scandal of Father 'The Hermit Clad in Crane Feathers' in R. Brown 'The point of a Pin'. van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the "tree" of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces. And in addition to this there are such new emerging subdisciplines as "experimental mathematics," "CFD," "completely integrable systems," "chaos, synergetics and large-scale order," which are almost impossible to fit into the existing classification schemes. They draw upon widely different sections of mathematics.

The geometrical theory of nonlinear differential equations originates from classical works by S. Lie and A. Backlund. It obtained a new impulse in the sixties when the complete integrability of the Korteweg-de Vries equation was found and it became clear that some basic and quite general geometrical and algebraic structures govern this property of integrability. Nowadays the geometrical and algebraic approach to partial differential equations constitutes a special branch of modern mathematics. In 1993, a workshop on algebra and geometry of differential equations took place at the University of Twente (The Netherlands), where the state-of-the-art of the main problems was fixed. This book contains a collection of invited lectures presented at this workshop. The material presented is of interest to those who work in pure and applied mathematics and especially in mathematical physics."

The words "microdifferential systems in the complex domain" refer to seve ral branches of mathematics: micro local analysis, linear partial differential equations, algebra, and complex analysis. The microlocal point of view first appeared in the study of propagation of singularities of differential equations, and is spreading now to other fields of mathematics such as algebraic geometry or algebraic topology. How ever it seems that many analysts neglect very elementary tools of algebra, which forces them to confine themselves to the study of a single equation or particular square matrices, or to carryon heavy and non-intrinsic formula tions when studying more general systems. On the other hand, many alge braists ignore everything about partial differential equations, such as for example the "Cauchy problem," although it is a very natural and geometri cal setting of "inverse image." Our aim will be to present to the analyst the algebraic methods which naturally appear in such problems, and to make available to the algebraist some topics from the theory of partial differential equations stressing its geometrical aspects. Keeping this goal in mind, one can only remain at an elementary level."

Regenerative gas turbines are attractive alternatives to diesel engines and spark ignition engines for automobiles and to diesel engines and combined-cycle en gines for power generation. Theory indicates regenerative gas turbines should achieve higher thermal efficiencies than those of diesel engines and combined cycle engines. Further, regenerative gas turbines are potentially lower in cost, require less maintenance, require less space, and pollute less than competitive systems. Regenerators can be used for exhaust-gas heat exchange or for intercooling in gas-turbine systems. As an exhaust-gas heat exchanger, a regenerator recovers heat from the exhaust and uses it to preheat the compressed air before the compressed air enters the combustor. Preheating of the compressed air permits a small heat input to the combustor for a given power output of the engine. As an intercooler, a regenerator cools the gas between compressor stages. Less work is required to compress cool gas than is required to compress warm gas. Therefore, a regenerator intercooler can reduce the required work input to the compressor. Thus, regenerators can be used to increase the thermal efficiencies and power outputs of gas turbines. the backbones of high-performance re High-performance regenerators are generative gas turbines. In the past, lack of understanding of regenerator per formance has led to sub-optimal engine designs. Now this book gives com prehensive regenerator information. With this book, the designer can design regenerators that will yield gas turbines with maximum thermal efficiencies."

This volume consists of a collection of articles for the proceedings of the 40th Taniguchi Symposium Analysis and Geometry in Several Complex Variables held in Katata, Japan, on June 23-28, 1997. Since the inhomogeneous Cauchy-Riemann equation was introduced in the study of Complex Analysis of Several Variables, there has been strong interaction between Complex Analysis and Real Analysis, in particular, the theory of Partial Differential Equations. Problems in Complex Anal ysis stimulate the development of the PDE theory which subsequently can be applied to Complex Analysis. This interaction involves Differen tial Geometry, for instance, via the CR structure modeled on the induced structure on the boundary of a complex manifold. Such structures are naturally related to the PDE theory. Differential Geometric formalisms are efficiently used in settling problems in Complex Analysis and the results enrich the theory of Differential Geometry. This volume focuses on the most recent developments in this inter action, including links with other fields such as Algebraic Geometry and Theoretical Physics. Written by participants in the Symposium, this vol ume treats various aspects of CR geometry and the Bergman kernel/ pro jection, together with other major subjects in modern Complex Analysis. We hope that this volume will serve as a resource for all who are interested in the new trends in this area. We would like to express our gratitude to the Taniguchi Foundation for generous financial support and hospitality. We would also like to thank Professor Kiyosi Ito who coordinated the organization of the symposium."

This collection of original papers related to the Israeli GAFA seminar (on Geometric Aspects of Functional Analysis) from the years 2006 to 2011 continues the long tradition of the previous volumes, which reflect the general trends of Asymptotic Geometric Analysis, understood in a broad sense, and are a source of inspiration for new research. Most of the papers deal with various aspects of the theory, including classical topics in the geometry of convex bodies, inequalities involving volumes of such bodies or more generally, logarithmically-concave measures, valuation theory, probabilistic and isoperimetric problems in the combinatorial setting, volume distribution on high-dimensional spaces and characterization of classical constructions in Geometry and Analysis (like the Legendre and Fourier transforms, derivation and others). All the papers here are original research papers.

The theory of vertex operator algebras and their representations has been showing its power in the solution of concrete mathematical problems and in the understanding of conceptual but subtle mathematical and physical struc- tures of conformal field theories. Much of the recent progress has deep connec- tions with complex analysis and conformal geometry. Future developments, especially constructions and studies of higher-genus theories, will need a solid geometric theory of vertex operator algebras. Back in 1986, Manin already observed in [Man) that the quantum theory of (super )strings existed (in some sense) in two entirely different mathematical fields. Under canonical quantization this theory appeared to a mathematician as the representation theories of the Heisenberg, Vir as oro and affine Kac- Moody algebras and their superextensions. Quantization with the help of the Polyakov path integral led on the other hand to the analytic theory of algebraic (super ) curves and their moduli spaces, to invariants of the type of the analytic curvature, and so on. He pointed out further that establishing direct mathematical connections between these two forms of a single theory was a "big and important problem. " On the one hand, the theory of vertex operator algebras and their repre- sentations unifies (and considerably extends) the representation theories of the Heisenberg, Virasoro and Kac-Moody algebras and their superextensions.

Positivity is one of the most basic mathematical concepts. In many areas of mathematics (like analysis, real algebraic geometry, functional analysis, etc.) it shows up as positivity of a polynomial on a certain subset of R DEGREESn which itself is often given by polynomial inequalities. The main objective of the book is to give useful characterizations of such polynomials. It takes as starting point Hilbert's 17th Problem from 1900 and explains how E. Artin's solution of that problem eventually led to the development of real algebra towards the end of the 20th century. Beyond basic knowledge in algebra, only valuation theory as explained in the appendix is needed. Thus the monograph can also serve as the basis for a 2-semester course in real a

This volume arises from the contributions presented at the MEGA 94 Con- ference (Metodos Efectivos en Geomctria Algebraica = Effective Methods in Algebraic Geometry), held at the University of Cantabria (Santander, Spain) April 59, 1994. Previous sessions of this biannual conference had taken place in Castiglioncello (Livorno, Italy, 1990) and in Nice (France, 1992) and the cor- responding proceedings have been published in the Birkhauser series Progress in Mathematics. volumes no. 94 and 109, respectively. The present collection consists of twenty articles involvillg miscellaneous topics concerning algorithms in algebra, algebraic geometry and related appli- cations. Fourteen of these papers correspond to the contents of the Conference's regular scientific program and have been selected, by the MEGA Committee, from the submitted contributions after a very rigorous refereeing procedure entailing an average of three independent reports per paper and two Program Committee panel discussions before and after the Conference. The remaining six papers (by S. Beck & M. Kreuzer, M. Bronstein, E. V. Flvnn. 1. Itenberg, J.-P. Merlet and 1\1. Seppala) correspond to invited talks and have also been subject to a post-conference refereeing procedure.

The volume contains both general and research papers. Among the first ones are papers showing recent and original developments or methods in subjects such as resolution of singularities, D-module theory, singularities of maps and geometry of curves. The research papers deal on topics related to, or close to, those listed_above. The contributions are organized in three parts according to their contents. Part I presents a set of papers on resolution of singularities, a topic of renewed activity. It deals with important topics of current interest, such as canonical, algorithmic, combinatorial and graphical procedures (Villamayor, Oka, Marijmin), as well as special results on desingularization in characteristic p (Cossart, Moh), and connections between resolution and structure of the space of arcs through a singularity (Gonz81ez-Sprinberg-Lejeune-Jalabert). Part II contains a series of papers on the study~of singularities and its connections with differential systems and deformation or perturbation theo- ries. Two expository papers (Maisonobe-Briam;on, :'vlebkhout) describe, in an algebro-geometric way, the interaction between singularities and D-module t.he- ory including recent progress on Bernstein polynomials and Newton polygon techniques. Geometry of foliations (Henaut, Garcfa-Reguera), polar varieties and stratifications (Hajto) are also topics treated here. Two other papers (Wall, Greuel-Pfister) deal with quasihomogeneous singularities in the contexts of per- turbations and moduli spaces. Globalization of deformations of singularities (de Jong) and determination of complex topology from the real one (~10nd) com- plete this series of papers. Part III consists of papers on algebraic geometry of curves and surfaces.

This volume is an outgrowth of the research project "The Inverse Ga lois Problem and its Application to Number Theory" which was carried out in three academic years from 1999 to 2001 with the support of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (1) No. 11440013. In September, 2001, an international conference "Galois Theory and Modular Forms" was held at Tokyo Metropolitan University after some preparatory work shops and symposia in previous years. The title of this book came from that of the conference, and the authors were participants of those meet All of the articles here were critically refereed by experts. Some of ings. these articles give well prepared surveys on branches of research areas, and many articles aim to bear the latest research results accompanied with carefully written expository introductions. When we started our re earch project, we picked up three areas to investigate under the key word "Galois groups"; namely, "generic poly nomials" to be applied to number theory, "Galois coverings of algebraic curves" to study new type of representations of absolute Galois groups, and explicitly described "Shimura varieties" to understand well the Ga lois structures of some interesting polynomials including Brumer's sextic for the alternating group of degree 5. The topics of the articles in this volume are widely spread as a result. At a first glance, some readers may think this book somewhat unfocussed."

The main purpose of this book is to give a systematic treatment of singular homology and cohomology theory. It is in some sense a sequel to the author's previous book in this Springer-Verlag series entitled Algebraic Topology: An Introduction. This earlier book is definitely not a logical prerequisite for the present volume. However, it would certainly be advantageous for a prospective reader to have an acquaintance with some of the topics treated in that earlier volume, such as 2-dimensional manifolds and the funda mental group. Singular homology and cohomology theory has been the subject of a number of textbooks in the last couple of decades, so the basic outline of the theory is fairly well established. Therefore, from the point of view of the mathematics involved, there can be little that is new or original in a book such as this. On the other hand, there is still room for a great deal of variety and originality in the details of the exposition. In this volume the author has tried to give a straightforward treatment of the subject matter, stripped of all unnecessary definitions, terminology, and technical machinery. He has also tried, wherever feasible, to emphasize the geometric motivation behind the various concepts."

I am pleased to participate in this Summer School and look forward to sharing some ideas with you over the next few days. At the outset I would like to describe the approach I will take in 1 presenting the material. I aim to present the material in a non rigorous way and hopefully in an intuitive manner. At the same time I will draw attention to some of the major technical problems. It is pitched at someone who is unfamiliar with the area. The results presented here are unfamiliar to actuaries and insurance mathematicians although they are well known in some other fields. During the next few minutes I will make some preliminary comments. The purpose of these comments is to place the lectures in perspective and motivate the upcoming material. After this I will outline briefly the topics to be covered during the rest of this lecture and in the lectures that will follow. One of the central themes of these lectures is RISK-SHARING. Risk-sharing is a common response to uncertainty. Such uncertainty can arise from natural phenomena or social causes. One particular form of risk-sharing is the insurance mechanism. I will be dealing with models which have a natural application in the insurance area but they have been applied in other areas as well. In fact some of the paradigms to be discussed have the capacity to provide a unified treatment of problems in diverse fields.

Content and Subject Matter: This research monograph deals with two main subjects, namely the notion of equimultiplicity and the algebraic study of various graded rings in relation to blowing ups. Both subjects are clearly motivated by their use in resolving singularities of algebraic varieties, for which one of the main tools consists in blowing up the variety along an equimultiple subvariety. For equimultiplicity a unified and self-contained treatment of earlier results of two of the authors is given, establishing a notion of equimultiplicity for situations other than the classical ones. For blowing up, new results are presented on the connection with generalized Cohen-Macaulay rings. To keep this part self-contained too, a section on local cohomology and local duality for graded rings and modules is included with detailed proofs. Finally, in an appendix, the notion of equimultiplicity for complex analytic spaces is given a geometric interpretation and its equivalence to the algebraic notion is explained. The book is primarily addressed to specialists in the subject but the self-contained and unified presentation of numerous earlier results make it accessible to graduate students with basic knowledge in commutative algebra.

This volume deals with the theory of finite topological spaces and its relationship with the homotopy and simple homotopy theory of polyhedra. The interaction between their intrinsic combinatorial and topological structures makes finite spaces a useful tool for studying problems in Topology, Algebra and Geometry from a new perspective. In particular, the methods developed in this manuscript are used to study Quillen's conjecture on the poset of p-subgroups of a finite group and the Andrews-Curtis conjecture on the 3-deformability of contractible two-dimensional complexes. This self-contained work constitutes the first detailed exposition on the algebraic topology of finite spaces. It is intended for topologists and combinatorialists, but it is also recommended for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students with a modest knowledge of Algebraic Topology.

These Proceedings contain selected papers by the speakers invited to the Seminar on Deformations, organized in 1985/87 by Julian tawryno- wicz (t6dz), whose most fruitful parts took place in 1986 in Lublin during the 3rd Finnish-Polish Summer School in Complex Analysis [in cooperation with O. Martio (JyvliskyHl)] held simultaneously with the 9th Conference on Analytic Function in Poland [in cooperation with S. Dimiev (Sofia), P. Dolbeault (Paris), K. Spallek (Bochum), and E. Vesen- tini (Pisa)]. The Lublin session of the Seminar, organized jointly with S. Dimiev and K. Spallek, was preceded by a session organized by them at Druzhba (near Varna) in 1985 and followed by a similar session at Druzhba in 1987. The collection contains 31 papers connected with deformations of mathematical structures in the context of complex analysis with physi- cal applications: (quasi)conformal deformation uniformization, potential theory, several complex variables, geometric algebra, algebraic ge- ometry, foliations, Hurwitz pairs, and Hermitian geometry. They are research papers in final form: no version of them will be submitted for publication elsewhere. In contrast to the previous volume (Seminar on Deformations, Proceedings, L6dz-WarsaUJ 1982/84, ed. by J. -i:.awrynowicz, Lecture Notes in Math. 1165, Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg- -New York-Tokyo 1985, X + 331 pp.) open problems are not published as separate research notes, but are included in the papers.

1. The Subject Matter. Consider a complex semisimple Lie group G with Lie algebra g and Weyl group W. In this book, we present a geometric perspective on the following circle of ideas: polynomials The "vertices" of this graph are some of the most important objects in representation theory. Each has a theory in its own right, and each has had its own independent historical development. - A nilpotent orbit is an orbit of the adjoint action of G on g which contains the zero element of g in its closure. (For the special linear group 2 G = SL(n, C), whose Lie algebra 9 is all n x n matrices with trace zero, an adjoint orbit consists of all matrices with a given Jordan canonical form; such an orbit is nilpotent if the Jordan form has only zeros on the diagonal. In this case, the nilpotent orbits are classified by partitions of n, given by the sizes of the Jordan blocks.) The closures of the nilpotent orbits are singular in general, and understanding their singularities is an important problem. - The classification of irreducible Weyl group representations is quite old.

The theory of Groebner bases is a main tool for dealing with rings of differential operators. This book reexamines the concept of Groebner bases from the point of view of geometric deformations. The algorithmic methods introduced in this book are particularly useful for studying the systems of multidimensional hypergeometric PDE's introduced by Gelfand, Kapranov, and Zelevinsky. A number of original research results are contained in the book, and many open problems are raised for future research in this rapidly growing area of computational mathematics.