This book, based on a graduate course given by the authors, is a pedagogic and self-contained introduction to the renormalization group with special emphasis on the functional renormalization group. The functional renormalization group is a modern formulation of the Wilsonian renormalization group in terms of formally exact functional differential equations for generating functionals.

In Part I the reader is introduced to the basic concepts of the renormalization group idea, requiring only basic knowledge of equilibrium statistical mechanics. More advanced methods, such as diagrammatic perturbation theory, are introduced step by step.

Part II then gives a self-contained introduction to the functional renormalization group. After a careful definition of various types of generating functionals, the renormalization group flow equations for these functionals are derived. This procedure is shown to encompass the traditional method of the mode elimination steps of the Wilsonian renormalization group procedure. Then, approximate solutions of these flow equations using expansions in powers of irreducible vertices or in powers of derivatives are given.

Finally, in Part III the exact hierarchy of functional renormalization group flow equations for the irreducible vertices is used to study various aspects of non-relativistic fermions, including the so-called BCS-BEC crossover, thereby making the link to contemporary research topics.

The production of heavy quarks in high-energy experiments offers a rich field to study, both experimentally and theoretically. Due to the additional quark mass, the description of these processes in the framework of perturbative QCD is much more demanding than it is for those involving only massless partons. In the last two decades, a large amount of precision data has been collected by the deep inelastic HERA experiment. In order to make full use of these data, a more precise theoretical description of charm quark production in deep inelastic scattering is needed. This work deals with the first calculation of fixed moments of the NNLO heavy flavor corrections to the proton structure function F2 in the limit of a small charm-quark mass. The correct treatment of these terms will allow not only a more precise analysis of the HERA data, but starting from there also a more precise determination of the parton distribution functions and the strong coupling constant, which is an essential input for LHC physics. The complexity of this calculation requires the application and development of technical and mathematical methods, which are also explained here in detail.

This volume reflects "New Trends in Shape Optimization" and is based on a workshop of the same name organized at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nurnberg in September 2013. During the workshop senior mathematicians and young scientists alike presented their latest findings. The format of the meeting allowed fruitful discussions on challenging open problems, and triggered a number of new and spontaneous collaborations. As such, the idea was born to produce this book, each chapter of which was written by a workshop participant, often with a collaborator. The content of the individual chapters ranges from survey papers to original articles; some focus on the topics discussed at the Workshop, while others involve arguments outside its scope but which are no less relevant for the field today. As such, the book offers readers a balanced introduction to the emerging field of shape optimization.

This book gives a general view of sequence analysis, the statistical study of successions of states, events or actions, one of the most promising venues of social science methodology.It includesinnovative contributions on life course studies, transitions into and out of work, contemporaneous and historical careers, time use, residential trajectories and political careers. The approach presented in this book is now central to the life-course perspective and the study of other social processes.

This book promotes the dialogue between approaches to sequence analysis that developed separately, within traditions contrasted in space and disciplines. It includes the latest developments about sequential concepts, coding, atypical datasets and time patterns, optimal matching and alternative algorithms, survey optimization and visualization. Field studies include original sequential material related to parenting in 19th-century Belgium, higher education and work in Finland and Italy, family formation before and after German reunification, French Jews persecuted in occupied France, long-term trends in electoral participation and regime democratization.

Overall the book reassesses the classical uses of sequences as well as it promotes new ways of collecting, formatting, representing and processing them. The introduction provides basic sequential concepts and tools, as well as a history of the method. Chapters are presented in a way that is both accessible to the beginner and informative to the expert."

There is no recent elementary introduction to the theory of discrete dynamical systems that stresses the topological background of the topic. This book fills this gap: it deals with this theory as 'applied general topology'. We treat all important concepts needed to understand recent literature. The book is addressed primarily to graduate students. The prerequisites for understanding this book are modest: a certain mathematical maturity and course in General Topology are sufficient.

The study of fluctuations in statistical physics has a long history, and a general theory is well established, connecting fluctuations to response properties of equilibrium systems. Remarkably, this framework fails as soon as some current is flowing across the system, driving it out of equilibrium. The presence of currents is quite common in nature and produces rich phenomena which are far from being included in a general framework. This thesis focuses on this general problem by studying different models such as granular materials and systems exhibiting anomalous diffusion and shows how the generalized response techniques can be successfully used to catch the relevant degrees of freedom that drive the systems out of equilibrium. This study paves the way to the use of the generalized fluctuation relations in an operative way, in order to extract information from a non-equilibrium system and to build the corresponding phenomenological theory.

The book reports on the latest theoretical and experimental advances in the field of active flow and combustion control. It covers new developments in actuator technology and sensing, in robust and optimal open- and closed-loop control, as well as in model reduction for control. It collects contributions presented during the third edition of the Active Flow and Combustion Control conference, held in September 10-12, 2014 at the Technische Universitat Berlin (Germany). This conference, as well as the research presented in the book, have been supported by the collaborative research center SFB 1029 -Substantial efficiency increase in gas turbines through direct use of coupled unsteady combustion and flow dynamics, funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation).

There are many approaches to noncommutative geometry and its use in physics, the ? operator algebra and C -algebra one, the deformation quantization one, the qu- tum group one, and the matrix algebra/fuzzy geometry one. This volume introduces and develops the subject by presenting in particular the ideas and methods recently pursued by Julius Wess and his group. These methods combine the deformation quantization approach based on the - tion of star product and the deformed (quantum) symmetries methods based on the theory of quantum groups. The merging of these two techniques has proven very fruitful in order to formulate ?eld theories on noncommutative spaces. The aim of the book is to give an introduction to these topics and to prepare the reader to enter the research ?eld himself/herself. This has developed from the constant interest of Prof. W. Beiglboeck, editor of LNP, in this project, and from the authors experience in conferences and schools on the subject, especially from their interaction with students and young researchers. In fact quite a few chapters in the book were written with a double purpose, on the one hand as contributions for school or conference proceedings and on the other handaschaptersforthepresentbook.Thesearenowharmonizedandcomplemented by a couple of contributions that have been written to provide a wider background, to widen the scope, and to underline the power of our methods.

"Robotic Mapping and Exploration" is an important contribution in the area of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for autonomous robots, which has been receiving a great deal of attention by the research community in the latest few years. The contents are focused on the autonomous mapping learning problem. Solutions include uncertainty-driven exploration, active loop closing, coordination of multiple robots, learning and incorporating background knowledge, and dealing with dynamic environments. Results are accompanied by a rich set of experiments, revealing a promising outlook toward the application to a wide range of mobile robots and field settings, such as search and rescue, transportation tasks, or automated vacuum cleaning.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to analyzing and solving optimal design problems in continuous media by means of the so-called sub-relaxation method. Though the underlying ideas are borrowed from other, more classical approaches, here they are used and organized in a novel way, yielding a distinct perspective on how to approach this kind of optimization problems. Starting with a discussion of the background motivation, the book broadly explains the sub-relaxation method in general terms, helping readers to grasp, from the very beginning, the driving idea and where the text is heading. In addition to the analytical content of the method, it examines practical issues like optimality and numerical approximation. Though the primary focus is on the development of the method for the conductivity context, the book's final two chapters explore several extensions of the method to other problems, as well as formal proofs. The text can be used for a graduate course in optimal design, even if the method would require some familiarity with the main analytical issues associated with this type of problems. This can be addressed with the help of the provided bibliography.

Using the author's considerable experience of applying Mathcad to engineering problems, Essential Mathcad introduces the most powerful functions and features of the software and teaches how to apply these to create comprehensive calculations for any quantitative subject. The simple, step-by-step approach makes this book an ideal Mathcad text for professional engineers as well as engineering, science, and math students. Examples from a variety of fields demonstrate the power and utility of Mathcad's tools, while also demonstrating how other software, such as Excel spreadsheets, can be incorporated effectively.
*Many more applied examples and exercises from a wide variety of engineering, science, and math fields
* New: more thorough discussions of differential equations, 3D plotting, and curve fitting.
* A step-by-step approach enables easy learning for professionals and students alike

This book deals with various computational procedures for multiple repeated analyses (reanalysis) of structures, and presents them in a unified approach. It meets the need for a general text covering the basic concepts and methods as well as recent developments in this area. Reanalysis is common to numerous analysis and design tasks such as nonlinear analysis, structural optimization, damage analysis, and probabilistic analysis. The book discusses various analysis models, including linear and nonlinear analysis, static and dynamic analysis, and design sensitivity analysis. It demonstrates how various concepts and methods are integrated to achieve effective solution procedures. The approach presented has several advantages in terms of generality, efficiency of the calculations, accuracy of the results and ease of implementation. Efficiency and accuracy considerations are discussed and illustrated. To clarify the presentation, many illustrative examples and numerical results are demonstrated. The text is related to a wide range of applications in such fields as Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Naval Architecture. This should prove useful to students, researchers, analysts and consultants involved in analysis and design of structures. Previous books on structural analysis do not cover most of the material presented in the book.

In 1917, Johann Radon published his fundamental work, where he introduced what is now called the Radon transform. Including important contributions by several experts, this book reports on ground-breaking developments related to the Radon transform throughout these years, and also discusses novel mathematical research topics and applications for the next century.

In this thesis, the author develops numerical techniques for tracking and characterising the convoluted nodal lines in three-dimensional space, analysing their geometry on the small scale, as well as their global fractality and topological complexity---including knotting---on the large scale. The work is highly visual, and illustrated with many beautiful diagrams revealing this unanticipated aspect of the physics of waves. Linear superpositions of waves create interference patterns, which means in some places they strengthen one another, while in others they completely cancel each other out. This latter phenomenon occurs on 'vortex lines' in three dimensions. In general wave superpositions modelling e.g. chaotic cavity modes, these vortex lines form dense tangles that have never been visualised on the large scale before, and cannot be analysed mathematically by any known techniques.

This book presents the theory of gas discharge plasmas in a didactical way. It explains the processes in gas discharge plasmas. A gas discharge plasma is an ionized gas which is supported by an external electric field. Therefore its parameters are determined by processes in it. The properties of a gas discharge plasma depend on its gas component, types of external fields, their geometry and regimes of gas discharge. Fundamentals of a gas discharge plasma include elementary, radiative and transport processes which are included in its kinetics influence. They are represented in this book together with the analysis of simple gas discharges. These general principles are applied to stationary gas discharge plasmas of helium and argon. The analysis of such plasmas under certain conditions is theoretically determined by numerical plasma parameters for given regimes and conditions.

The effective planning of residential location choices is one of the great challenges of contemporary societies and requires forecasting capabilities and the consideration of complex interdependencies which can only be handled by complex computer models. This book presents a range of approaches used to model residential locations within the context of developing land-use and transport models. These approaches illustrate the range of choices that modellers have to make in order to represent residential choice behaviour. The models presented in this book represent the state-of-the-art and are valuable both as key building blocks for general urban models, and as representative examples of complexity science.

The main focus of this thesis is the mathematical structure of Group Field Theories (GFTs) from the point of view of renormalization theory. Such quantum field theories are found in approaches to quantum gravity related, on the one hand, to Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) and on the other, to matrix- and tensor models. Background material on these topics, including conceptual and technical aspects, are introduced in the first chapters. The work then goes on to explain how the standard tools of Quantum Field Theory can be generalized to GFTs and exploited to study the large cut-off behaviour and renormalization group transformations of the latter. Among the new results derived in this context are a proof of renormalizability of a three-dimensional GFT with gauge group SU(2), which opens the way to applications of the formalism to quantum gravity.

A lot of economic problems can be formulated as constrained optimizations and equilibration of their solutions. Various mathematical theories have been supplying economists with indispensable machineries for these problems arising in economic theory. Conversely, mathematicians have been stimulated by various mathematical difficulties raised by economic theories. The series is designed to bring together those mathematicians who are seriously interested in getting new challenging stimuli from economic theories with those economists who are seeking effective mathematical tools for their research.

This second edition sees the light three years after the first one: too short a time to feel seriously concerned to redesign the entire book, but sufficient to be challenged by the prospect of sharpening our investigation on the working of econometric dynamic models and to be inclined to change the title of the new edition by dropping the "Topics in" of the former edition. After considerable soul searching we agreed to include several results related to topics already covered, as well as additional sections devoted to new and sophisticated techniques, which hinge mostly on the latest research work on linear matrix polynomials by the second author. This explains the growth of chapter one and the deeper insight into representation theorems in the last chapter of the book. The role of the second chapter is that of providing a bridge between the mathematical techniques in the backstage and the econometric profiles in the forefront of dynamic modelling. For this purpose, we decided to add a new section where the reader can find the stochastic rationale of vector autoregressive specifications in econometrics. The third (and last) chapter improves on that of the first edition by re- ing the fruits of the thorough analytic equipment previously drawn up."

The book provides a generalized theoretical technique for solving the fewbody Schroedinger equation. Straight forward approaches to solve it in terms of position vectors of constituent particles and using standard mathematical techniques become too cumbersome and inconvenient when the system contains more than two particles. The introduction of Jacobi vectors, hyperspherical variables and hyperspherical harmonics as an expansion basis is an elegant way to tackle systematically the problem of an increasing number of interacting particles. Analytic expressions for hyperspherical harmonics, appropriate symmetrisation of the wave function under exchange of identical particles and calculation of matrix elements of the interaction have been presented. Applications of this technique to various problems of physics have been discussed. In spite of straight forward generalization of the mathematical tools for increasing number of particles, the method becomes computationally difficult for more than a few particles. Hence various approximation methods have also been discussed. Chapters on the potential harmonics and its application to Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) have been included to tackle dilute system of a large number of particles. A chapter on special numerical algorithms has also been provided. This monograph is a reference material for theoretical research in the few-body problems for research workers starting from advanced graduate level students to senior scientists.

The spectral theory of linear operators in Hilbert spaces is the most important tool in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics; in fact, linear ope- tors and quantum mechanics have had a symbiotic relationship. However, typical physicstextbooks on quantum mechanics givejust a roughsketch of operator t- ory, occasionallytreating linear operatorsas matricesin ?nite-dimensional spaces; the implicit justi?cation is that the details of the theory of unbounded operators are involved and those texts are most interested in applications. Further, it is also assumed that mathematical intricacies do not show up in the models to be d- cussedorareskippedby"heuristicarguments. "Inmanyoccasionssomequestions, such as the very de?nition of the hamiltonian domain, are not touched, leaving an open door for controversies, ambiguities and choices guided by personal tastes and ad hoc prescriptions. All in all, sometimes a blank is left in the mathematical background of people interested in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics was the most profound revolution in physics; it is not natural to our common sense (check, for instance, the wave-particle duality) and the mathematics may become crucial when intuition fails. Even some very simple systemspresentnontrivialquestionswhoseanswersneedamathematicalapproach. For example, the Hamiltonian of a quantum particle con?ned to a box involves a choice of boundary conditions at the box ends; since di?erent choices imply di?erentphysicalmodels, studentsshouldbeawareofthebasicdi?cultiesintrinsic tothis(inprinciple)verysimple model, aswellasinmoresophisticatedsituations. The theory of linear operators and their spectra constitute a wide ?eld and it is expected that the selection of topics in this book will help to ?ll this theoretical gap. Ofcoursethisselectionisgreatlybiasedtowardthepreferencesofthe author.

This book gives a wide-ranging description of the many facets of complex dynamic networks and systems within an infrastructure provided by integrated control and supervision: envisioning, design, experimental exploration, and implementation. The theoretical contributions and the case studies presented can reach control goals beyond those of stabilization and output regulation or even of adaptive control. Reporting on work of the Control of Complex Systems (COSY) research program, Complex Systems follows from and expands upon an earlier collection: Control of Complex Systems by introducing novel theoretical techniques for hard-to-control networks and systems. The major common feature of all the superficially diverse contributions encompassed by this book is that of spotting and exploiting possible areas of mutual reinforcement between control, computing and communications. These help readers to achieve not only robust stable plant system operation but also properties such as collective adaptivity, integrity and survivability at the same time retaining desired performance quality. Applications in the individual chapters are drawn from: * the general implementation of model-based diagnosis and systems engineering in medical technology, in communication, and in power and airport networks; * the creation of biologically inspired control brains and safety-critical human-machine systems, * process-industrial uses; * biped robots; * large space structures and unmanned aerial vehicles; and * precision servomechanisms and other advanced technologies. Complex Systems provides researchers from engineering, applied mathematics and computer science backgrounds with innovative theoretical and practical insights into the state-of-the-art of complex networks and systems research. It employs physical implementations and extensive computer simulations. Graduate students specializing in complex-systems

This volume features key contributions from the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods, (ICPRAM 2012,) held in Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal from February 6th-8th, 2012. The conference provided a major point of collaboration between researchers, engineers and practitioners in the areas of Pattern Recognition, both from theoretical and applied perspectives, with a focus on mathematical methodologies. Contributions describe applications of pattern recognition techniques to real-world problems, interdisciplinary research, and experimental and theoretical studies which yield new insights that provide key advances in the field. This book will be suitable for scientists and researchers in optimization, numerical methods, computer science, statistics and for differential geometers and mathematical physicists.