This volume is both a tribute to Ulrich Felgner's research in algebra, logic, and set theory and a strong research contribution to these areas. Felgner's former students, friends and collaborators have contributed sixteen papers to this volume that highlight the unity of these three fields in the spirit of Ulrich Felgner's own research. The interested reader will find excellent original research surveys and papers that span the field from set theory without the axiom of choice via model-theoretic algebra to the mathematics of intonation.

A collection of surveys and research papers on mathematical software and algorithms. The common thread is that the field of mathematical applications lies on the border between algebra and geometry. Topics include polyhedral geometry, elimination theory, algebraic surfaces, Gröbner bases, triangulations of point sets and the mutual relationship. This diversity is accompanied by the abundance of available software systems which often handle only special mathematical aspects. This is why the volume also focuses on solutions to the integration of mathematical software systems. This includes low-level and XML based high-level communication channels as well as general frameworks for modular systems.

This book is mainly devoted to some computational and algorithmic problems in finite fields such as, for example, polynomial factorization, finding irreducible and primitive polynomials, the distribution of these primitive polynomials and of primitive points on elliptic curves, constructing bases of various types and new applications of finite fields to other areas of mathematics. For completeness we in clude two special chapters on some recent advances and applications of the theory of congruences (optimal coefficients, congruential pseudo-random number gener ators, modular arithmetic, etc.) and computational number theory (primality testing, factoring integers, computation in algebraic number theory, etc.). The problems considered here have many applications in Computer Science, Cod ing Theory, Cryptography, Numerical Methods, and so on. There are a few books devoted to more general questions, but the results contained in this book have not till now been collected under one cover. In the present work the author has attempted to point out new links among different areas of the theory of finite fields. It contains many very important results which previously could be found only in widely scattered and hardly available conference proceedings and journals. In particular, we extensively review results which originally appeared only in Russian, and are not well known to mathematicians outside the former USSR."

The theory of quasivarieties constitutes an independent direction in algebra and mathematical logic and specializes in a fragment of first-order logic-the so-called universal Horn logic. This treatise uniformly presents the principal directions of the theory from an effective algebraic approach developed by the author himself. A revolutionary exposition, this influential text contains a number of results never before published in book form, featuring in-depth commentary for applications of quasivarieties to graphs, convex geometries, and formal languages. Key features include coverage of the Birkhoff-Mal'tsev problem on the structure of lattices of quasivarieties, helpful exercises, and an extensive list of references.

Terrorism is one of the serious threats to international peace and security that we face in this decade. No nation can consider itself immune from the dangers it poses, and no society can remain disengaged from the efforts to combat it. The termcounterterrorism refers to the techniques, strategies, and tactics used in the ?ght against terrorism. Counterterrorism efforts involve many segments of so- ety, especially governmental agencies including the police, military, and intelligence agencies (both domestic and international). The goal of counterterrorism efforts is to not only detect and prevent potential future acts but also to assist in the response to events that have already occurred. A terrorist cell usually forms very quietly and then grows in a pattern - sp- ning international borders, oceans, and hemispheres. Surprising to many, an eff- tive "weapon," just as quiet - mathematics - can serve as a powerful tool to combat terrorism, providing the ability to connect the dots and reveal the organizational pattern of something so sinister. The events of 9/11 instantly changed perceptions of the wordsterrorist andn- work, especially in the United States. The international community was confronted with the need to tackle a threat which was not con?ned to a discreet physical - cation. This is a particular challenge to the standard instruments for projecting the legal authority of states and their power to uphold public safety. As demonstrated by the events of the 9/11 attack, we know that terrorist attacks can happen anywhere.

This volume develops the depth and breadth of the mathematics underlying the construction and analysis of Hadamard matrices, and their use in the construction of combinatorial designs. At the same time, it pursues current research in their numerous applications in security and cryptography, quantum information, and communications. Bridges among diverse mathematical threads and extensive applications make this an invaluable source for understanding both the current state of the art and future directions. The existence of Hadamard matrices remains one of the most challenging open questions in combinatorics. Substantial progress on their existence has resulted from advances in algebraic design theory using deep connections with linear algebra, abstract algebra, finite geometry, number theory, and combinatorics. Hadamard matrices arise in a very diverse set of applications. Starting with applications in experimental design theory and the theory of error-correcting codes, they have found unexpected and important applications in cryptography, quantum information theory, communications, and networking.

In this book the authors describe the important generalization of the original Weil conjectures, as given by P. Deligne in his fundamental paper "La conjecture de Weil II". The authors follow the important and beautiful methods of Laumon and Brylinski which lead to a simplification of Deligne's theory. Deligne's work is closely related to the sheaf theoretic theory of perverse sheaves. In this framework Deligne's results on global weights and his notion of purity of complexes obtain a satisfactory and final form. Therefore the authors include the complete theory of middle perverse sheaves. In this part, the l-adic Fourier transform is introduced as a technique providing natural and simple proofs. To round things off, there are three chapters with significant applications of these theories.

The finite-difference solution of mathematical-physics differential equations is carried out in two stages: 1) the writing of the difference scheme (a differ ence approximation to the differential equation on a grid), 2) the computer solution of the difference equations, which are written in the form of a high order system of linear algebraic equations of special form (ill-conditioned, band-structured). Application of general linear algebra methods is not always appropriate for such systems because of the need to store a large volume of information, as well as because of the large amount of work required by these methods. For the solution of difference equations, special methods have been developed which, in one way or another, take into account special features of the problem, and which allow the solution to be found using less work than via the general methods. This work is an extension of the book Difference M ethod3 for the Solution of Elliptic Equation3 by A. A. Samarskii and V. B. Andreev which considered a whole set of questions connected with difference approximations, the con struction of difference operators, and estimation of the onvergence rate of difference schemes for typical elliptic boundary-value problems. Here we consider only solution methods for difference equations. The book in fact consists of two volumes."

The relevance of commutator methods in spectral and scattering theory has been known for a long time, and numerous interesting results have been ob tained by such methods. The reader may find a description and references in the books by Putnam [Pu], Reed-Simon [RS] and Baumgartel-Wollenberg [BW] for example. A new point of view emerged around 1979 with the work of E. Mourre in which the method of locally conjugate operators was introduced. His idea proved to be remarkably fruitful in establishing detailed spectral properties of N-body Hamiltonians. A problem that was considered extremely difficult be fore that time, the proof of the absence of a singularly continuous spectrum for such operators, was then solved in a rather straightforward manner (by E. Mourre himself for N = 3 and by P. Perry, 1. Sigal and B. Simon for general N). The Mourre estimate, which is the main input of the method, also has consequences concerning the behaviour of N-body systems at large times. A deeper study of such propagation properties allowed 1. Sigal and A. Soffer in 1985 to prove existence and completeness of wave operators for N-body systems with short range interactions without implicit conditions on the potentials (for N = 3, similar results were obtained before by means of purely time-dependent methods by V. Enss and by K. Sinha, M. Krishna and P. Muthuramalingam). Our interest in commutator methods was raised by the major achievements mentioned above.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Albert Crumeyrolle, who died on June 17, 1992. In organizing the volume we gave priority to: articles summarizing Crumeyrolle's own work in differential geometry, general relativity and spinors, articles which give the reader an idea of the depth and breadth of Crumeyrolle's research interests and influence in the field, articles of high scientific quality which would be of general interest. In each of the areas to which Crumeyrolle made significant contribution - Clifford and exterior algebras, Weyl and pure spinors, spin structures on manifolds, principle of triality, conformal geometry - there has been substantial progress. Our hope is that the volume conveys the originality of Crumeyrolle's own work, the continuing vitality of the field he influenced, and the enduring respect for, and tribute to, him and his accomplishments in the mathematical community. It isour pleasure to thank Peter Morgan, Artibano Micali, Joseph Grifone, Marie Crumeyrolle and Kluwer Academic Publishers for their help in preparingthis volume.

Much progress has been made during the last decade on the subjects of non commutative valuation rings, and of semi-hereditary and Priifer orders in a simple Artinian ring which are considered, in a sense, as global theories of non-commu tative valuation rings. So it is worth to present a survey of the subjects in a self-contained way, which is the purpose of this book. Historically non-commutative valuation rings of division rings were first treat ed systematically in Schilling's Book [Sc], which are nowadays called invariant valuation rings, though invariant valuation rings can be traced back to Hasse's work in [Has]. Since then, various attempts have been made to study the ideal theory of orders in finite dimensional algebras over fields and to describe the Brauer groups of fields by usage of "valuations", "places", "preplaces", "value functions" and "pseudoplaces". In 1984, N. 1. Dubrovin defined non-commutative valuation rings of simple Artinian rings with notion of places in the category of simple Artinian rings and obtained significant results on non-commutative valuation rings (named Dubrovin valuation rings after him) which signify that these rings may be the correct def inition of valuation rings of simple Artinian rings. Dubrovin valuation rings of central simple algebras over fields are, however, not necessarily to be integral over their centers.

This book presents methods of solving problems in three areas of elementary combinatorial mathematics: classical combinatorics, combinatorial arithmetic, and combinatorial geometry. In each topic, brief theoretical discussions are immediately followed by carefully worked-out examples of increasing degrees of difficulty, and by exercises that range from routine to rather challenging. While this book emphasizes some methods that are not usually covered in beginning university courses, it nevertheless teaches techniques and skills that are useful not only in the specific topics covered here. There are approximately 310 examples and 650 exercises. Jiri Herman is the headmaster of a prestigious secondary school (Gymnazium) in Brno, Radan Kucera is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Masaryk University in Brno, and Jaromir Simsa is a researcher at the Mathematical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The translator, Karl Dilcher, is Professor of Mathematics at Dalhousie University in Canada. This book can be seen as a continuation of the previous book by the same authors and also translated by Karl Dilcher, Equations and Inequalities: Elementary Problems and Theorems in Algebra and Number Theory (Springer-Verlag 2000).

This book is about the development of reciprocity laws, starting from conjectures of Euler and discussing the contributions of Legendre, Gauss, Dirichlet, Jacobi, and Eisenstein. Readers knowledgeable in basic algebraic number theory and Galois theory will find detailed discussions of the reciprocity laws for quadratic, cubic, quartic, sextic and octic residues, rational reciprocity laws, and Eisenstein's reciprocity law. An extensive bibliography will be of interest to readers interested in the history of reciprocity laws or in the current research in this area.

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 transparency and power of geometric constructions has been a source of inspiration to generations of mathematicians. The beauty and persuasion of pictures, communicated in words or drawings, continues to provide the intuition and arguments for working with complicated concepts and structures of modern mathematics. This volume contains a selection of articles exploring geometric approaches to problems in algebra, algebraic geometry and number theory.

Key topics include:

* Curves and their Jacobians

* Algebraic surfaces

* Moduli spaces, Shimura varieties

* Motives and motivic integration

* Number-theoretic applications, rational points

* Combinatorial aspects of algebraic geometry

* Quantum cohomology

* Arithmetic dynamical systems

The collection gives a representative sample of problems and most recent results in algebraic and arithmetic geometry; the text can serve as an intense introduction for graduate students and those wishing to pursue research in these areas.

Contributors: I. Bauer, F. Bogomolov, N. Budur, F. Catanese, C.-L. Chai, R. Cluckers, C. De Concini, J.S. Ellenberg, F. Grunewald, B. Hassett, T. Hausel, F. Loeser, J. Pineiro, R. Pink, C. Procesi, M. Spitzweck, P. Swinnerton-Dyer, L. Szpiro, H. Tamvakis, Y. Tschinkel, T.J. Tucker, A. Venkatesh, and Y.G. Zarhin.

From the 28th of February through the 3rd of March, 2001, the Department of Math ematics of the University of Florida hosted a conference on the many aspects of the field of Ordered Algebraic Structures. Officially, the title was "Conference on Lattice Ordered Groups and I-Rings," but its subject matter evolved beyond the limitations one might associate with such a label. This volume is officially the proceedings of that conference, although, likewise, it is more accurate to view it as a complement to that event. The conference was the fourth in wh at has turned into aseries of similar conferences, on Ordered Algebraic Structures, held in consecutive years. The first, held at the University of Florida in Spring, 1998, was a modest and informal affair. The fifth is in the final planning stages at this writing, for March 7-9, 2002, at Vanderbilt University. And although these events remain modest and reasonably informal, their scope has broadened, as they have succeeded in attracting mathematicians from other, related fields, as weIl as from more distant lands."

This book is concerned with cardinal number valued functions defined for any Boolean algebra. Examples of such functions are independence, which assigns to each Boolean algebra the supremum of the cardinalities of its free subalgebras, and cellularity, which gives the supremum of cardinalities of sets of pairwise disjoint elements. Twenty-one such functions are studied in detail, and many more in passing. The questions considered are the behaviour of these functions under algebraic operations such as products, free products, ultraproducts, and their relationships to one another. Assuming familiarity with only the basics of Boolean algebras and set theory, through simple infinite combinatorics and forcing, the book reviews current knowledge about these functions, giving complete proofs for most facts. A special feature of the book is the attention given to open problems, of which 185 are formulated. Based on Cardinal Functions on Boolean Algebras (1990) and Cardinal Invariants on Boolean Algebras (1996) by the same author, the present work is much larger than either of these. It contains solutions to many of the open problems of the earlier volumes. Among the new topics are continuum cardinals on Boolean algebras, with a lengthy treatment of the reaping number. Diagrams at the end of the book summarize the relationships between the functions for many important classes of Boolean algebras, including interval algebras, tree algebras and superatomic algebras.

This book extends classical Hermite-Hadamard type inequalities to the fractional case via establishing fractional integral identities, and discusses Riemann-Liouville and Hadamard integrals, respectively, by various convex functions. Illustrating theoretical results via applications in special means of real numbers, it is an essential reference for applied mathematicians and engineers working with fractional calculus. Contents Introduction Preliminaries Fractional integral identities Hermite-Hadamard inequalities involving Riemann-Liouville fractional integrals Hermite-Hadamard inequalities involving Hadamard fractional integrals

This is the first of two volumes of a state-of-the-art survey article collection which originates from three commutative algebra sessions at the 2009 Fall Southeastern American Mathematical Society Meeting at Florida Atlantic University. The articles reach into diverse areas of commutative algebra and build a bridge between Noetherian and non-Noetherian commutative algebra. These volumes present current trends in two of the most active areas of commutative algebra: non-noetherian rings (factorization, ideal theory, integrality), and noetherian rings (the local theory, graded situation, and interactions with combinatorics and geometry). This volume contains combinatorial and homological surveys. The combinatorial papers document some of the increasing focus in commutative algebra recently on the interaction between algebra and combinatorics. Specifically, one can use combinatorial techniques to investigate resolutions and other algebraic structures as with the papers of Floystad on Boij-Soederburg theory, of Geramita, Harbourne and Migliore, and of Cooper on Hilbert functions, of Clark on minimal poset resolutions and of Mermin on simplicial resolutions. One can also utilize algebraic invariants to understand combinatorial structures like graphs, hypergraphs, and simplicial complexes such as in the paper of Morey and Villarreal on edge ideals. Homological techniques have become indispensable tools for the study of noetherian rings. These ideas have yielded amazing levels of interaction with other fields like algebraic topology (via differential graded techniques as well as the foundations of homological algebra), analysis (via the study of D-modules), and combinatorics (as described in the previous paragraph). The homological articles the editors have included in this volume relate mostly to how homological techniques help us better understand rings and singularities both noetherian and non-noetherian such as in the papers by Roberts, Yao, Hummel and Leuschke.

In 2008, November 23-28, the workshop of "Classical Problems on Planar Polynomial Vector Fields " was held in the Banff International Research Station, Canada. Called "classical problems", it was concerned with the following: (1) Problems on integrability of planar polynomial vector fields. (2) The problem of the center stated by Poincare for real polynomial differential systems, which asks us to recognize when a planar vector field defined by polynomials of degree at most n possesses a singularity which is a center. (3) Global geometry of specific classes of planar polynomial vector fields. (4) Hilbert's 16th problem. These problems had been posed more than 110 years ago. Therefore, they are called "classical problems" in the studies of the theory of dynamical systems. The qualitative theory and stability theory of differential equations, created by Poincare and Lyapunov at the end of the 19th century, had major developments as two branches of the theory of dynamical systems during the 20th century. As a part of the basic theory of nonlinear science, it is one of the very active areas in the new millennium. This book presents in an elementary way the recent significant developments in the qualitative theory of planar dynamical systems. The subjects are covered as follows: the studies of center and isochronous center problems, multiple Hopf bifurcations and local and global bifurcations of the equivariant planar vector fields which concern with Hilbert's 16th problem. The book is intended for graduate students, post-doctors and researchers in dynamical systems. For all engineers who are interested in the theory of dynamical systems, it is also a reasonable reference. It requires a minimum background of a one-year course on nonlinear differential equations.

This book describes the latest Russian research covering the structure and algorithmic properties of Boolean algebras from the algebraic and model-theoretic points of view. A significantly revised version of the author's Countable Boolean Algebras (Nauka, Novosibirsk, 1989), the text presents new results as well as a selection of open questions on Boolean algebras. Other current features include discussions of the Kottonen algebras in enrichments by ideals and automorphisms, and the properties of the automorphism groups.

The term Noncommutative Dynamics can be interpreted in several ways. It is used in this book to refer to a set of phenomena associated with the dynamics of quantum systems of the simplest kind that involve rigorous mathematical structures associated with infinitely many degrees of freedom. The dynamics of such a system is represented by a one-parameter group of automorphisms of a noncommutative algebra of observables, and the author focuses primarily on the most concrete case in which that algebra consists of all bounded operators on a Hilbert space. This subject overlaps with several mathematical areas of current interest, including quantum field theory, the dynamics of open quantum systems, noncommutative geometry, and both classical and noncommutative probability theory. This is the first book to give a systematic presentation of progress during the past fifteen years on the classification of E-semigroups up to cocycle conjugacy. There are many new results that cannot be found in the existing literature, as well as significant reformulations and simplifications of the theory as it exists today. William Arveson is Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published two previous books with Springer-Verlag, An Invitation to C*-algebras (1976) and A Short Course on Spectral Theory (2001).

This book presents the general theory of categorical closure operators together with examples and applications to the most common categories, such as topological spaces, fuzzy topological spaces, groups, and abelian groups. The main aim of the theory is to develop a categorical characterization of the classical basic concepts in topology via the newly introduced concept of categorical closure operators. This permits many topological ideas to be introduced in a topology-free environment and imported afterwards into a new category, which often yields interesting new insights into its structure. The first part of the book deals with the general theory, starting with basic definitions and gradually moving to more advanced properties. The second part includes applications to the classical concepts of epimorphisms, separation, compactness and connectedness. Every chapter ends with exercises. A comprehensive list of references for the reader who wants to consult original works and a good index complete the book. "Categorical Closure Operators" is self-contained and can be considered as a graduate level text for topics courses in category theory, algebra, and topology. The book appeals mainly to graduate students and researchers in category theory and categorical topology, and to those interested in categorical methods applied to the most common concrete categories. The reader is expected to have some basic knowledge of algebra, topology and category theory; however, all recurrent categorical concepts are included in a preliminary chapter.