¿The author describes this marvelous book as designed for beginning graduate students in mathematics¿-in particular for those who intend to specialize in applied mathematics, and for graduate students in other disciplines such as engineering, physics and computer science. The first six chapters contain enough material for a year course, and the final two chapters contain related material¿ Those who are familiar with the author¿s earlier books will not be surprised by its excellence. It is businesslike and will be found to be demanding, but it is user-friendly. It is the reviewer¿s opinion that it will be extremely useful and popular as a text; institutions that do not already require their students to take such a course no longer have an excuse, and should immediately organize one based on this book.¿ ¿Mathematical Reviews

This monograph has grown out of research we started in 1987, although the foun dations were laid in the 1970's when both of us were working on our doctoral theses, trying to generalize the now classic paper of Oleinik, Kalashnikov and Chzhou on nonlinear degenerate diffusion. Brian worked under the guidance of Bert Peletier at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, and, later at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands on extending the earlier mathematics to include nonlinear convection; while Robert worked at Lomonosov State Univer sity in Moscow under the supervision of Anatolii Kalashnikov on generalizing the earlier mathematics to include nonlinear absorption. We first met at a conference held in Rome in 1985. In 1987 we met again in Madrid at the invitation of Ildefonso Diaz, where we were both staying at 'La Residencia'. As providence would have it, the University 'Complutense' closed down during this visit in response to student demonstra tions, and, we were very much left to our own devices. It was natural that we should gravitate to a research topic of common interest. This turned out to be the characterization of the phenomenon of finite speed of propagation for nonlin ear reaction-convection-diffusion equations. Brian had just completed some work on this topic for nonlinear diffusion-convection, while Robert had earlier done the same for nonlinear diffusion-absorption. There was no question but that we bundle our efforts on the general situation.

Classical Sobolev spaces, based on Lebesgue spaces on an underlying domain with smooth boundary, are not only of considerable intrinsic interest but have for many years proved to be indispensible in the study of partial differential equations and variational problems. Many developments of the basic theory since its inception arise in response to concrete problems, for example, with the (ubiquitous) sets with fractal boundaries.

The theory will probably enjoy substantial further growth, but even now a connected account of the mature parts of it makes a useful addition to the literature. Accordingly, the main themes of this book are Banach spaces and spaces of Sobolev type based on them; integral operators of Hardy type on intervals and on trees; and the distribution of the approximation numbers (singular numbers in the Hilbert space case) of embeddings of Sobolev spaces based on generalised ridged domains.

This timely book will be of interest to all those concerned with the partial differential equations and their ramifications. A prerequisite for reading it is a good graduate course in real analysis.

Real-life problems are often quite complicated in form and nature and, for centuries, many different mathematical concepts, ideas and tools have been developed to formulate these problems theoretically and then to solve them either exactly or approximately.

This book aims to gather a collection of papers dealing with several different problems arising from many disciplines and some modern mathematical approaches to handle them. In this respect, the book offers a wide overview on many of the current trends in Mathematics as valuable formal techniques in capturing and exploiting the complexity involved in real-world situations.

Several researchers, colleagues, friends and students of Professor Maria Luisa Menendez have contributed to this volume to pay tribute to her and to recognize the diverse contributions she had made to the fields of Mathematics and Statistics and to the profession in general. She had a sweet and strong personality, and instilled great values and work ethics in her students through her dedication to teaching and research. Even though the academic community lost her prematurely, she would continue to provide inspiration to many students and researchers worldwide through her published work."

Classical boundary integral equations arising from the potential theory and acoustics (Laplace and Helmholtz equations) are derived. Using the parametrization of the boundary these equations take a form of periodic pseudodifferential equations. A general theory of periodic pseudodifferential equations and methods of solving are developed, including trigonometric Galerkin and collocation methods, their fully discrete versions with fast solvers, quadrature and spline based methods. The theory of periodic pseudodifferential operators is presented in details, with preliminaries (Fredholm operators, periodic distributions, periodic Sobolev spaces) and full proofs. This self-contained monograph can be used as a textbook by graduate/postgraduate students. It also contains a lot of carefully chosen exercises.

Psychophysics is by definition mappings between events in the environment and levels of human sensory responses. In this text the methods of nonlinear dynamics, employing trajectories developed for simpler sensory modelling, are extended to classes of problems which lie at the interface between sensation and perception. A diversity of topics for which extensive empirical evidence exists are reformulated by writing their dynamics in terms of complex trajectories put into coupled lattices and into cascades of such lattices. Fundamental relationships between core processes of psychophysics in time and space, and recurrent quantitative or topological distortions of the physical world which arise in perception, are given a treatment which contrasts fundamentally with traditional linear equations in use since the 19th century.

In the modern theory of boundary value problems the following ap proach to investigation is agreed upon (we call it the functional approach): some functional spaces are chosen; the statements of boundary value prob the basis of these spaces; and the solvability of lems are formulated on the problems, properties of solutions, and their dependence on the original data of the problems are analyzed. These stages are put on the basis of the correct statement of different problems of mathematical physics (or of the definition of ill-posed problems). For example, if the solvability of a prob lem in the functional spaces chosen cannot be established then, probably, the reason is in their unsatisfactory choice. Then the analysis should be repeated employing other functional spaces. Elliptical problems can serve as an example of classical problems which are analyzed by this approach. Their investigations brought a number of new notions and results in the theory of Sobolev spaces W;(D) which, in turn, enabled us to create a sufficiently complete theory of solvability of elliptical equations. Nowadays the mathematical theory of radiative transfer problems and kinetic equations is an extensive area of modern mathematical physics. It has various applications in astrophysics, the theory of nuclear reactors, geophysics, the theory of chemical processes, semiconductor theory, fluid mechanics, etc. 25,29,31,39,40, 47, 52, 78, 83, 94, 98, 120, 124, 125, 135, 146]."

With contributions by specialists in optimization and practitioners in the fields of aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, and fluid and solid mechanics, the major themes include an assessment of the state of the art in optimization algorithms as well as challenging applications in design and control, in the areas of process engineering and systems with partial differential equation models.

"The Classical Theory of Integral Equations" is a thorough, concise, and rigorous treatment of the essential aspects of the theory of integral equations. The book provides the background and insight necessary to facilitate a complete understanding of the fundamental results in the field. With a firm foundation for the theory in their grasp, students will be well prepared and motivated for further study.

Included in the presentation are:

A section entitled "Tools of the Trade" at the beginning of each chapter, providing necessary background information for comprehension of the results presented in that chapter;

Thorough discussions of the analytical methods used to solve many types of integral equations;

An introduction to the numerical methods that are commonly used to produce approximate solutions to integral equations;

Over 80 illustrative examples that are explained in meticulous detail;
Nearly 300 exercises specifically constructed to enhance the understanding of both routine and challenging concepts;
"Guides to Computation" to assist the student with particularly complicated algorithmic procedures.

This unique textbook offers a comprehensive and balanced treatment of material needed for a general understanding of the theory of integral equations by using only the mathematical background that a typical undergraduate senior should have. The self-contained book will serve as a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate-level students as well as for independent study. Scientists and engineers who are working in the field will also find this text to be user friendly and informative.

"

This book aims at restructuring some fundamentals in measure and integration theory. It centers around the ubiquitous task to produce appropriate contents and measures from more primitive data like elementary contents and elementary integrals. It develops the new approach started around 1970 by Topsoe and others into a systematic theory. The theory is much more powerful than the traditional means and has striking implications all over measure theory and beyond.

The student of calculus is entitled to ask what calculus is and what it can be used for. This short book provides an answer.The author starts by demonstrating that calculus provides a mathematical tool for the quantitative analysis of a wide range of dynamical phenomena and systems with variable quantities.He then looks at the origins and intuitive sources of calculus, its fundamental methodology, and its general framework and basic structure, before examining a few typical applications.The author's style is direct and pedagogical. The new student should find that the book provides a clear and strong grounding in this important technique.

This is the first book to comprehensively cover quantum probabilistic approaches to spectral analysis of graphs, an approach developed by the authors. The book functions as a concise introduction to quantum probability from an algebraic aspect. Here readers will learn several powerful methods and techniques of wide applicability, recently developed under the name of quantum probability. The exercises at the end of each chapter help to deepen understanding.

While there are many excellent books available on fundamental and applied electromagnetics, most introduce operator concepts in an ad hoc manner, and few discuss the subject within the general framework of operator theory. This is in contrast to quantum theory, where the use of operators and concepts from functional analysis is common. However, casting electromagnetic problems in terms of operator theory produces useful insights into the mathematical properties and physical characteristics of solutions. For instance, the commonly used modal expansion of fields in waveguides are immediately justified upon identifying the differential operators as being of the appropriate Sturm-Liouville type. As another example, existence, uniqueness and solvability of integral formulations can often be settled by appealing to the theory of Fredholm operators. Many other examples that illustrate the value of abstracting problems to an operator level are provided. Although the book focuses on mathematical fundamentals, it is written from the perspective of engineers and applied scientists working in electromagnetics. The book begins with a review of electromagnetic theory, including a discussion of singular integral operators commonly encountered in applications. It then turns to a self-contained introduction to operator theory, including basic functional analysis, linear operators, Green¿s functions and Green¿s operators, spectral theory, and Sturm-Liouville operators. The discussion is at an introductory mathematical level, presenting definitions and theorems, as well as proofs of the theorems when these are particularly simple or enlightening. The tools developed in this first part of the book are then applied to problems in classical electromagnetic theory: boundary-value problems and potential theory, transmission lines, waves in layered media, scattering problems in waveguides, and electromagnetic cavities.

This book collects recent research papers by respected specialists in the field. It presents advances in the field of geometric properties for parabolic and elliptic partial differential equations, an area that has always attracted great attention. It settles the basic issues (existence, uniqueness, stability and regularity of solutions of initial/boundary value problems) before focusing on the topological and/or geometric aspects. These topics interact with many other areas of research and rely on a wide range of mathematical tools and techniques, both analytic and geometric. The Italian and Japanese mathematical schools have a long history of research on PDEs and have numerous active groups collaborating in the study of the geometric properties of their solutions.

The aim of this book is to present the mathematical theory and the know-how to make computer programs for the numerical approximation of Optimal Control of PDE's. The computer programs are presented in a straightforward generic language. As a consequence they are well structured, clearly explained and can be translated easily into any high level programming language. Applications and corresponding numerical tests are also given and discussed. To our knowledge, this is the first book to put together mathematics and computer programs for Optimal Control in order to bridge the gap between mathematical abstract algorithms and concrete numerical ones. The text is addressed to students and graduates in Mathematics, Mechanics, Applied Mathematics, Numerical Software, Information Technology and Engineering. It can also be used for Master and Ph.D. programs.

The aim of this monograph is to give a unified account fo the classical topics in fixed point theory that lie on the border-line of topology and non-linear functional analysis, emphasizing the topological developments related to the Leray-Schauder theory. The first part of this book is based on "Fixed Point Theory I" which was published by PWN, Warsaw in 1982. The second part follows the outline conceived by Andrzej Granas and the late James Dugunji. The completionof this work has been awaited for many years by researchers in this area. "If the authors do equally well with the second volume they will have produced the best monograph in this particular field."Math Reviews

Inverse problems and optimal design have come of age as a consequence of the availability of better, more accurate, and more efficient simulation packages. Many of these simulators, which can run on small workstations, can capture the complicated behavior of the physical systems they are modeling, and have become commonplace tools in engineering and science. There is a great desire to use them as part of a process by which measured field data are analyzed or by which design of a product is automated. A major obstacle in doing precisely this is that one is ultimately confronted with a large-scale optimization problem. This volume contains expository articles on both inverse problems and design problems formulated as optimization. Each paper describes the physical problem in some detail and is meant to be accessible to researchers in optimization as well as those who work in applied areas where optimization is a key tool. What emerges in the presentations is that there are features about the problem that must be taken into account in posing the objective function, and in choosing an optimization strategy. In particular there are certain structures peculiar to the problems that deserve special treatment, and there is ample opportunity for parallel computation. THIS IS BACK COVER TEXT Inverse problems and optimal design have come of age as a consequence of the availability of better, more accurate, and more efficient, simulation packages. The problem of determining the parameters of a physical system from

In this book the author sets out to answer two important questions: 1. Which numerical methods may be combined together? 2. How can different numerical methods be matched together? In doing so the author presents a number of useful combinations, for instance, the combination of various FEMs, the combinations of FEM-FDM, REM-FEM, RGM-FDM, etc. The combined methods have many advantages over single methods: high accuracy of solutions, less CPU time, less computer storage, easy coupling with singularities as well as the complicated boundary conditions. Since coupling techniques are essential to combinations, various matching strategies among different methods are carefully discussed. The author provides the matching rules so that optimal convergence, even superconvergence, and optimal stability can be achieved, and also warns of the matching pitfalls to avoid. Audience: The book is intended for both mathematicians and engineers and may be used as text for advanced students.

The book contains the methods and bases of functional analysis that are directly adjacent to the problems of numerical mathematics and its applications; they are what one needs for the understand ing from a general viewpoint of ideas and methods of computational mathematics and of optimization problems for numerical algorithms. Functional analysis in mathematics is now just the small visible part of the iceberg. Its relief and summit were formed under the influence of this author's personal experience and tastes. This edition in English contains some additions and changes as compared to the second edition in Russian; discovered errors and misprints had been corrected again here; to the author's distress, they jump incomprehensibly from one edition to another as fleas. The list of literature is far from being complete; just a number of textbooks and monographs published in Russian have been included. The author is grateful to S. Gerasimova for her help and patience in the complex process of typing the mathematical manuscript while the author corrected, rearranged, supplemented, simplified, general ized, and improved as it seemed to him the book's contents. The author thanks G. Kontarev for the difficult job of translation and V. Klyachin for the excellent figures."

On the 8th of August 1900 outstanding German mathematician David Hilbert delivered a talk "Mathematical problems" at the Second Interna tional Congress of Mathematicians in Paris. The talk covered practically all directions of mathematical thought of that time and contained a list of 23 problems which determined the further development of mathema tics in many respects (1, 119]. Hilbert's Sixteenth Problem (the second part) was stated as follows: Problem. To find the maximum number and to determine the relative position of limit cycles of the equation dy Qn(X, y) -= dx Pn(x, y)' where Pn and Qn are polynomials of real variables x, y with real coeffi cients and not greater than n degree. The study of limit cycles is an interesting and very difficult problem of the qualitative theory of differential equations. This theory was origi nated at the end of the nineteenth century in the works of two geniuses of the world science: of the Russian mathematician A. M. Lyapunov and of the French mathematician Henri Poincare. A. M. Lyapunov set forth and solved completely in the very wide class of cases a special problem of the qualitative theory: the problem of motion stability (154]. In turn, H. Poincare stated a general problem of the qualitative analysis which was formulated as follows: not integrating the differential equation and using only the properties of its right-hand sides, to give as more as possi ble complete information on the qualitative behaviour of integral curves defined by this equation (176]."

This volume of the Encyclopaedia is a survey of stochastic calculus, an increasingly important part of probability, authored by well-known experts in the field. The book addresses graduate students and researchers in probability theory and mathematical statistics, as well as physicists and engineers who need to apply stochastic methods.

The main theme of this book is the homotopy principle for holomorphic mappings from Stein manifolds to the newly introduced class of Oka manifolds. The book contains the first complete account of Oka-Grauert theory and its modern extensions, initiated by Mikhail Gromov and developed in the last decade by the author and his collaborators. Included is the first systematic presentation of the theory of holomorphic automorphisms of complex Euclidean spaces, a survey on Stein neighborhoods, connections between the geometry of Stein surfaces and Seiberg-Witten theory, and a wide variety of applications ranging from classical to contemporary."

The approximation of functions by linear positive operators is an important research topic in general mathematics and it also provides powerful tools to application areas suchas computer-aided geometric design, numerical analysis, and solutions of differential equations. q-Calculus is a generalization of many subjects, such as hypergeometric series, complex analysis, and particle physics. This monograph is an introduction to combining approximation theory and q-Calculus with applications, by usingwell- known operators. The presentation is systematic and the authors include a brief summary of the notations and basicdefinitions ofq-calculus before delving into more advanced material. Themany applications of q-calculus in the theory of approximation, especially onvariousoperators, which includes convergence of operators to functions in real and complex domain forms the gist of the book.

This book is suitable for researchers andstudents in mathematics, physics andengineering, and forprofessionals who would enjoy exploring the host of mathematicaltechniques and ideas that are collected and discussedin thebook."

With contributions by specialists in optimization and practitioners in the fields of aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, and fluid and solid mechanics, the major themes include an assessment of the state of the art in optimization algorithms as well as challenging applications in design and control, in the areas of process engineering and systems with partial differential equation models.