And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. Genesis 1,3 Light is not only the basis of our biological existence, but also an essential source of our knowledge about the physical laws of nature, ranging from the seventeenth century geometrical optics up to the twentieth century theory of general relativity and quantum electrodynamics. Folklore Don't give us numbers: give us insight! A contemporary natural scientist to a mathematician The present book is the second volume of a comprehensive introduction to themathematicalandphysicalaspectsofmodernquantum?eldtheorywhich comprehends the following six volumes: Volume I: Basics in Mathematics and Physics Volume II: Quantum Electrodynamics Volume III: Gauge Theory Volume IV: Quantum Mathematics Volume V: The Physics of the Standard Model Volume VI: Quantum Gravitation and String Theory. It is our goal to build a bridge between mathematicians and physicists based on the challenging question about the fundamental forces in * macrocosmos (the universe) and * microcosmos (the world of elementary particles). The six volumes address a broad audience of readers, including both und- graduate and graduate students, as well as experienced scientists who want to become familiar with quantum ?eld theory, which is a fascinating topic in modern mathematics and physics.

This is a monograph devoted to recent research and results on dynamic inequalities on time scales. The study of dynamic inequalities on time scales has been covered extensively in the literature in recent years and has now become a major sub-field in pure and applied mathematics. In particular, this book will cover recent results on integral inequalities, including Young's inequality, Jensen's inequality, Holder's inequality, Minkowski's inequality, Steffensen's inequality, Hermite-Hadamard inequality and Cebysv's inequality. Opial type inequalities on time scales and their extensions with weighted functions, Lyapunov type inequalities, Halanay type inequalities for dynamic equations on time scales, and Wirtinger type inequalities on time scales and their extensions will also be discussed here in detail.

The purpose of this monograph is to present the current status of a rapidly developing part of several complex variables, motivated by the applicability of effective results to algebraic geometry and differential geometry. Highlighted are the new precise results on the L(2) extension of holomorphic functions. In Chapter 1, the classical questions of several complex variables motivating the development of this field are reviewed after necessary preparations from the basic notions of those variables and of complex manifolds such as holomorphic functions, pseudoconvexity, differential forms, and cohomology. In Chapter 2, the L(2) method of solving the d-bar equation is presented emphasizing its differential geometric aspect. In Chapter 3, a refinement of the Oka-Cartan theory is given by this method. The L(2) extension theorem with an optimal constant is included, obtained recently by Z. Blocki and by Q.-A. Guan and X.-Y. Zhou separately. In Chapter 4, various results on the Bergman kernel are presented, including recent works of Maitani-Yamaguchi, Berndtsson, and Guan-Zhou. Most of these results are obtained by the L(2) method. In the last chapter, rather specific results are discussed on the existence and classification of certain holomorphic foliations and Levi flat hypersurfaces as their stables sets. These are also applications of the L(2) method obtained during these 15 years.

This book contains the proceedings of the 23rd International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications (IWOTA 2012), which was held at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) from 16 July to 20 July 2012. It includes twelve articles presenting both surveys of current research in operator theory and original results.

This volume gathers contributions from the International Workshop on Operator Theory and Its Applications (IWOTA) held in Bangalore, India, in December 2013. All articles were written by experts and cover a broad range of original material at the cutting edge of operator theory and its applications. Topics include multivariable operator theory, operator theory on indefinite metric spaces (Krein and Pontryagin spaces) and its applications, spectral theory with applications to differential operators, the geometry of Banach spaces, scattering and time varying linear systems, and wavelets and coherent states.

The stability problem for approximate homomorphisms, or the Ulam stability problem, was posed by S. M. Ulam in the year 1941. The solution of this problem for various classes of equations is an expanding area of research. In particular, the pursuit of solutions to the Hyers-Ulam and Hyers-Ulam-Rassias stability problems for sets of functional equations and ineqalities has led to an outpouring of recent research. This volume, dedicated to S. M. Ulam, presents the most recent results on the solution to Ulam stability problems for various classes of functional equations and inequalities. Comprised of invited contributions from notable researchers and experts, this volume presents several important types of functional equations and inequalities and their applications to problems in mathematical analysis, geometry, physics and applied mathematics. "Functional Equations in Mathematical Analysis" is intended for researchers and students in mathematics, physics, and other computational and applied sciences.

The appearance of weakly wandering (ww) sets and sequences for ergodic transformations over half a century ago was an unexpected and surprising event. In time it was shown that ww and related sequences reflected significant and deep properties of ergodic transformations that preserve an infinite measure. This monograph studies in a systematic way the role of ww and related sequences in the classification of ergodic transformations preserving an infinite measure. Connections of these sequences to additive number theory and tilings of the integers are also discussed. The material presented is self-contained and accessible to graduate students. A basic knowledge of measure theory is adequate for the reader.

A careful and accessible exposition of functional analytic methods in stochastic analysis is provided in this book. It focuses on the interrelationship between three subjects in analysis: Markov processes, semi groups and elliptic boundary value problems. The author studies a general class of elliptic boundary value problems for second-order, Waldenfels integro-differential operators in partial differential equations and proves that this class of elliptic boundary value problems provides a general class of Feller semigroups in functional analysis. As an application, the author constructs a general class of Markov processes in probability in which a Markovian particle moves both by jumps and continuously in the state space until it 'dies' at the time when it reaches the set where the particle is definitely absorbed. Augmenting the 1st edition published in 2004, this edition includes four new chapters and eight re-worked and expanded chapters. It is amply illustrated and all chapters are rounded off with Notes and Comments where bibliographical references are primarily discussed. Thanks to the kind feedback from many readers, some errors in the first edition have been corrected. In order to keep the book up-to-date, new references have been added to the bibliography. Researchers and graduate students interested in PDEs, functional analysis and probability will find this volume useful.

Banach spaces provide a framework for linear and nonlinear functional analysis, operator theory, abstract analysis, probability, optimization and other branches of mathematics. This book introduces the reader to linear functional analysis and to related parts of infinite-dimensional Banach space theory. Key Features: - Develops classical theory, including weak topologies, locally convex space, Schauder bases and compact operator theory - Covers Radon-Nikodym property, finite-dimensional spaces and local theory on tensor products - Contains sections on uniform homeomorphisms and non-linear theory, Rosenthal's L1 theorem, fixed points, and more - Includes information about further topics and directions of research and some open problems at the end of each chapter - Provides numerous exercises for practice The text is suitable for graduate courses or for independent study. Prerequisites include basic courses in calculus and linear. Researchers in functional analysis will also benefit for this book as it can serve as a reference book.

This textbook presents the physical principles pertinent to the mathematical modeling of soft materials used in engineering practice, including both man-made materials and biological tissues. It is intended for seniors and masters-level graduate students in engineering, physics or applied mathematics. It will also be a valuable resource for researchers working in mechanics, biomechanics and other fields where the mechanical response of soft solids is relevant. Soft Solids: A Primer to the Theoretical Mechanics of Materials is divided into two parts. Part I introduces the basic concepts needed to give both Eulerian and Lagrangian descriptions of the mechanical response of soft solids. Part II presents two distinct theories of elasticity and their associated theories of viscoelasticity. Seven boundary-value problems are studied over the course of the book, each pertaining to an experiment used to characterize materials. These problems are discussed at the end of each chapter, giving students the opportunity to apply what they learned in the current chapter and to build upon the material in prior chapters.

The book develops modern methods and in particular the "generic chaining" to bound stochastic processes. This methods allows in particular to get optimal bounds for Gaussian and Bernoulli processes. Applications are given to stable processes, infinitely divisible processes, matching theorems, the convergence of random Fourier series, of orthogonal series, and to functional analysis. The complete solution of a number of classical problems is given in complete detail, and an ambitious program for future research is laid out.

This book presents a range of entropy methods for diffusive PDEs devised by many researchers in the course of the past few decades, which allow us to understand the qualitative behavior of solutions to diffusive equations (and Markov diffusion processes). Applications include the large-time asymptotics of solutions, the derivation of convex Sobolev inequalities, the existence and uniqueness of weak solutions, and the analysis of discrete and geometric structures of the PDEs. The purpose of the book is to provide readers an introduction to selected entropy methods that can be found in the research literature. In order to highlight the core concepts, the results are not stated in the widest generality and most of the arguments are only formal (in the sense that the functional setting is not specified or sufficient regularity is supposed). The text is also suitable for advanced master and PhD students and could serve as a textbook for special courses and seminars.

The book investigates classical and more recent methods of study for the asymptotic behavior of dissipative continuous dynamical systems with applications to ordinary and partial differential equations, the main question being convergence (or not) of the solutions to an equilibrium. After reviewing the basic concepts of topological dynamics and the definition of gradient-like systems on a metric space, the authors present a comprehensive exposition of stability theory relying on the so-called linearization method. For the convergence problem itself, when the set of equilibria is infinite, the only general results that do not require very special features of the non-linearities are presently consequences of a gradient inequality discovered by S. Lojasiewicz. The application of this inequality jointly with the so-called Liapunov-Schmidt reduction requires a rigorous exposition of Semi-Fredholm operator theory and the theory of real analytic maps on infinite dimensional Banach spaces, which cannot be found anywhere in a readily applicable form. The applications covered in this short text are the simplest, but more complicated cases are mentioned in the final chapter, together with references to the corresponding specialized papers.

The goal of this work is to present the principles of functional analysis in a clear and concise way. The first three chapters of Functional Analysis: Fundamentals and Applications describe the general notions of distance, integral and norm, as well as their relations. The three chapters that follow deal with fundamental examples: Lebesgue spaces, dual spaces and Sobolev spaces. Two subsequent chapters develop applications to capacity theory and elliptic problems. In particular, the isoperimetric inequality and the Polya-Szego and Faber-Krahn inequalities are proved by purely functional methods. The epilogue contains a sketch of the history of functional analysis, in relation with integration and differentiation. Starting from elementary analysis and introducing relevant recent research, this work is an excellent resource for students in mathematics and applied mathematics.

In the last decade, the areas of quadratic and higher degree forms have witnessed dramatic advances. This volume is an outgrowth of three seminal conferences on these topics held in 2009, two at the University of Florida and one at the Arizona Winter School. The volume also includes papers from the two focused weeks on quadratic forms and integral lattices at the University of Florida in 2010.Topics discussed include the links between quadratic forms and automorphic forms, representation of integers and forms by quadratic forms, connections between quadratic forms and lattices, and algorithms for quaternion algebras and quadratic forms. The book will be of interest to graduate students and mathematicians wishing to study quadratic and higher degree forms, as well as to established researchers in these areas. Quadratic and Higher Degree Forms contains research and semi-expository papers that stem from the presentations at conferences at the University of Florida as well as survey lectures on quadratic forms based on the instructional workshop for graduate students held at the Arizona Winter School. The survey papers in the volume provide an excellent introduction to various aspects of the theory of quadratic forms starting from the basic concepts and provide a glimpse of some of the exciting questions currently being investigated. The research and expository papers present the latest advances on quadratic and higher degree forms and their connections with various branches of mathematics.

This monograph presents some cornerstone results in the study of sofic and hyperlinear groups and the closely related Connes' embedding conjecture. These notions, as well as the proofs of many results, are presented in the framework of model theory for metric structures. This point of view, rarely explicitly adopted in the literature, clarifies the ideas therein, and provides additional tools to attack open problems. Sofic and hyperlinear groups are countable discrete groups that can be suitably approximated by finite symmetric groups and groups of unitary matrices. These deep and fruitful notions, introduced by Gromov and Radulescu, respectively, in the late 1990s, stimulated an impressive amount of research in the last 15 years, touching several seemingly distant areas of mathematics including geometric group theory, operator algebras, dynamical systems, graph theory, and quantum information theory. Several long-standing conjectures, still open for arbitrary groups, are now settled for sofic or hyperlinear groups. The presentation is self-contained and accessible to anyone with a graduate-level mathematical background. In particular, no specific knowledge of logic or model theory is required. The monograph also contains many exercises, to help familiarize the reader with the topics present.

The "extensions" of rings and modules have yet to be explored in detail in a research monograph. This book presents state of the art research and also stimulating new and further research. Broken into three parts, Part I begins with basic notions, terminology, definitions and a description of the classes of rings and modules. Part II considers the transference of conditions between a base ring or module and its extensions. And Part III utilizes the concept of a minimal essental extension with respect to a specific class (a hull). Mathematical interdisciplinary applications appear throughout. Major applications of the ring and module theory to Functional Analysis, especially C*-algebras, appear in Part III, make this book of interest to Algebra and Functional Analysis researchers. Notes and exercises at the end of every chapter, and open problems at the end of all three parts, lend this as an ideal textbook for graduate or advanced undergradate students.

This volume is dedicated to Leonid Lerer on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The main part presents recent results in Lerer's research area of interest, which includes Toeplitz, Toeplitz plus Hankel, and Wiener-Hopf operators, Bezout equations, inertia type results, matrix polynomials, and related areas in operator and matrix theory. Biographical material and Lerer's list of publications complete the volume.

Quaternion and Clifford Fourier and wavelet transformations generalize the classical theory to higher dimensions and are becoming increasingly important in diverse areas of mathematics, physics, computer science and engineering. This edited volume presents the state of the art in these hypercomplex transformations. The Clifford algebras unify Hamilton's quaternions with Grassmann algebra. A Clifford algebra is a complete algebra of a vector space and all its subspaces including the measurement of volumes and dihedral angles between any pair of subspaces. Quaternion and Clifford algebras permit the systematic generalization of many known concepts. This book provides comprehensive insights into current developments and applications including their performance and evaluation. Mathematically, it indicates where further investigation is required. For instance, attention is drawn to the matrix isomorphisms for hypercomplex algebras, which will help readers to see that software implementations are within our grasp. It also contributes to a growing unification of ideas and notation across the expanding field of hypercomplex transforms and wavelets. The first chapter provides a historical background and an overview of the relevant literature, and shows how the contributions that follow relate to each other and to prior work. The book will be a valuable resource for graduate students as well as for scientists and engineers.

The main results of this book combine pseudo differential analysis with modular form theory. The methods rely for the most part on explicit spectral theory and the extended use of special functions. The starting point is a notion of modular distribution in the plane, which will be new to most readers and relates under the Radon transformation to the classical one of modular form of the non-holomorphic type. Modular forms of the holomorphic type are addressed too in a more concise way, within a general scheme dealing with quantization theory and elementary, but novel, representation-theoretic concepts.

In this book, fundamental methods of nonlinear analysis are introduced, discussed and illustrated in straightforward examples. Each method considered is motivated and explained in its general form, but presented in an abstract framework as comprehensively as possible. A large number of methods are applied to boundary value problems for both ordinary and partial differential equations. In this edition we have made minor revisions, added new material and organized the content slightly differently. In particular, we included evolutionary equations and differential equations on manifolds. The applications to partial differential equations follow every abstract framework of the method in question. The text is structured in two levels: a self-contained basic level and an advanced level - organized in appendices - for the more experienced reader. The last chapter contains more involved material and can be skipped by those new to the field. This book serves as both a textbook for graduate-level courses and a reference book for mathematicians, engineers and applied scientists

Random Matrices are one of the major research areas in modern probability theory, due to their prominence in many different fields such as nuclear physics, statistics, telecommunication, free probability, non-commutative geometry, and dynamical systems. A great deal of recent work has focused on the study of spectra of large random matrices on the one hand and on iterated random functions, especially random difference equations, on the other. However, the methods applied in these two research areas are fairly dissimilar. Motivated by the idea that tools from one area could potentially also be helpful in the other, the volume editors have selected contributions that present results and methods from random matrix theory as well as from the theory of iterated random functions. This work resulted from a workshop that was held in Munster, Germany in 2011. The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers from two fields of probability theory: random matrix theory and the theory of iterated random functions. Random matrices play fundamental, yet very different roles in the two fields. Accordingly, leading figures and young researchers gave talks on their field of interest that were also accessible to a broad audience.

The discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is an extremely useful tool that finds application in many different disciplines. However, its use requires caution. The aim of this book is to explain the DFT and its various artifacts and pitfalls and to show how to avoid these (whenever possible), or at least how to recognize them in order to avoid misinterpretations. This concentrated treatment of the DFT artifacts and pitfalls in a single volume is, indeed, new, and it makes this book a valuable source of information for the widest possible range of DFT users. Special attention is given to the one and two dimensional cases due to their particular importance, but the discussion covers the general multidimensional case, too. The book favours a pictorial, intuitive approach which is supported by mathematics, and the discussion is accompanied by a large number of figures and illustrative examples, some of which are visually attractive and even spectacular. Mastering the Discrete Fourier Transform in One, Two or Several Dimensions is intended for scientists, engineers, students and any readers who wish to widen their knowledge of the DFT and its practical use. This book will also be very useful for 'naive' users from various scientific or technical disciplines who have to use the DFT for their respective applications. The prerequisite mathematical background is limited to an elementary familiarity with calculus and with the continuous and discrete Fourier theory.

Working in the fractional Laplace framework, this book provides models and theorems related to nonlocal diffusion phenomena. In addition to a simple probabilistic interpretation, some applications to water waves, crystal dislocations, nonlocal phase transitions, nonlocal minimal surfaces and Schroedinger equations are given. Furthermore, an example of an s-harmonic function, its harmonic extension and some insight into a fractional version of a classical conjecture due to De Giorgi are presented. Although the aim is primarily to gather some introductory material concerning applications of the fractional Laplacian, some of the proofs and results are new. The work is entirely self-contained, and readers who wish to pursue related subjects of interest are invited to consult the rich bibliography for guidance.

Kosaku Yosida, born on February 7, 1909, was brought up in Tokyo. Having majored in Mathematics at University of Tokyo, he was appointed to Assistant at Osaka University in 1933 and promoted to Associate Professor in 1934. He re ceived the title of Doctor of Science from Osaka University in 1939. In 1942 he was appointed to Professor at Nagoya University, where he worked very hard with his colleagues to promote and expand the newly established Department of Mathe matics. He was appointed to Professor at Osaka University in 1953 and then to Professor at University of Tokyo in 1955. After retiring from University of Tokyo in 1969, he was appointed to Professor at Kyoto University, where he also acted as Director of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He retired from Kyoto University in 1972 and worked as Professor at Gakushuin University until 1979. Yosida acted as President of the Mathematical Society of Japan, as Member of the Science Council of Japan, and as Member of the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union. In 1967 he received the Japan Academy Prize and the Imperial Prize for his famous work on the theory of semigroups and its applications. In 1971 he was elected Member of the Japan Academy. Yosida went abroad many times to give series of lectures at mathematical in stitutions and to deliver invited lectures at international mathematical symposia.