As the telecommunication industry introduces new sophisticated technologies, the nature of services and the volume of demands have changed. Indeed, a broad range of new services for users appear, combining voice, data, graphics, video, etc. This implies new planning issues. Fiber transmission systems that can carry large amounts of data on a few strands of wire were introduced. These systems have such a large bandwidth that the failure of even a single transmission link: in the network can create a severe service loss to customers. Therefore, a very high level of service reliability is becoming imperative for both system users and service providers. Since equipment failures and accidents cannot be avoided entirely, networks have to be designed so as to "survive" failures. This is done by judiciously installing spare capacity over the network so that all traffic interrupted by a failure may be diverted around that failure by way of this spare or reserve capacity. This of course translates into huge investments for network operators. Designing such survivable networks while minimizing spare capacity costs is, not surprisingly, a major concern of operating companies which gives rise to very difficult combinatorial problems. In order to make telecommunication networks survivable, one can essentially use two different strategies: protection or restoration. The protection approach preas signs spare capacity to protect each element of the network independently, while the restoration approach spreads the redundant capacity over the whole network and uses it as required in order to restore the disrupted traffic."

In this thesis, the author considers quantum gravity to investigate the mysterious origin of our universe and its mechanisms. He and his collaborators have greatly improved the analyticity of two models: causal dynamical triangulations (CDT) and n-DBI gravity, with the space-time foliation which is one common factor shared by these two separate models.

In the first part, the analytic method of coupling matters to CDT in 2-dimensional toy models is proposed to uncover the underlying mechanisms of the universe and to remove ambiguities remaining in CDT. As a result, the wave function of the 2-dimensional universe where matters are coupled is derived. The behavior of the wave function reveals that the Hausdorff dimension can be changed when the matter is non-unitary.

In the second part, the n-DBI gravity model is considered. The author mainly investigates two effects driven by the space-time foliation: the appearance of a new conserved charge in black holes and an extra scalar mode of the graviton. The former implies a breakdown of the black-hole uniqueness theorem while the latter does not show any pathological behavior.

"

Polynomial extremal problems (PEP) constitute one of the most important subclasses of nonlinear programming models. Their distinctive feature is that an objective function and constraints can be expressed by polynomial functions in one or several variables. Let: e = {: e 1, ...: en} be the vector in n-dimensional real linear space Rn; n PO(: e), PI (: e), ..., Pm (: e) are polynomial functions in R with real coefficients. In general, a PEP can be formulated in the following form: (0.1) find r = inf Po(: e) subject to constraints (0.2) Pi (: e) =0, i=l, ..., m (a constraint in the form of inequality can be written in the form of equality by introducing a new variable: for example, P( x) 0 is equivalent to P(: e) + y2 = 0). Boolean and mixed polynomial problems can be written in usual form by adding for each boolean variable z the equality: Z2 - Z = O. Let a = {al, ..., a } be integer vector with nonnegative entries {a;}f=l. n Denote by R a](: e) monomial in n variables of the form: n R a](: e) = IT: ef';;=1 d(a) = 2:7=1 ai is the total degree of monomial R a]. Each polynomial in n variables can be written as sum of monomials with nonzero coefficients: P(: e) = L caR a](: e), aEA{P) IX x Nondifferentiable optimization and polynomial problems where A(P) is the set of monomials contained in polynomial P

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the first conference of the Society for Computational Economics held at ICC Institute, Austin, Texas, May 21-24, 1995. Twenty-two papers are included in this volume, devoted to applications of computational methods for the empirical analysis of economic and financial systems; the development of computing methodology, including software, related to economics and finance; and the overall impact of developments in computing. The various contributions represented in the volume indicate the growing interest in the topic due to the increased availability of computational concepts and tools and the necessity of analyzing complex decision problems. The papers in this volume are divided into four sections: Computational methods in econometrics, Computational methods in finance, Computational methods for a social environment and New computational methods.GBP/LISTGBP

The Virasoro algebra is an infinite dimensional Lie algebra that plays an increasingly important role in mathematics and theoretical physics. This book describes some fundamental facts about the representation theory of the Virasoro algebra in a self-contained manner. Topics include the structure of Verma modules and Fock modules, the classification of (unitarizable) Harish-Chandra modules, tilting equivalence, and the rational vertex operator algebras associated to the so-called minimal series representations.

Covering a wide range of material, this book has three appendices which provide background information required for some of the chapters. The authors organize fundamental results in a unified way and refine existing proofs. For instance in chapter three, a generalization of Jantzen filtration is reformulated in an algebraic manner, and geometric interpretation is provided. Statements, widely believed to be true, are collated, and results which are known but not verified are proven, such as the corrected structure theorem of Fock modules in chapter eight.

This book will be of interest to a wide range of mathematicians and physicists from the level of graduate students to researchers.

Group sequential methods answer the needs of clinical trial monitoring committees who must assess the data available at an interim analysis. These interim results may provide grounds for terminating the study-effectively reducing costs-or may benefit the general patient population by allowing early dissemination of its findings. Group sequential methods provide a means to balance the ethical and financial advantages of stopping a study early against the risk of an incorrect conclusion.
Group Sequential Methods with Applications to Clinical Trials describes group sequential stopping rules designed to reduce average study length and control Type I and II error probabilities. The authors present one-sided and two-sided tests, introduce several families of group sequential tests, and explain how to choose the most appropriate test and interim analysis schedule. Their topics include placebo-controlled randomized trials, bio-equivalence testing, crossover and longitudinal studies, and linear and generalized linear models.
Research in group sequential analysis has progressed rapidly over the past 20 years. Group Sequential Methods with Applications to Clinical Trials surveys and extends current methods for planning and conducting interim analyses. It provides straightforward descriptions of group sequential hypothesis tests in a form suited for direct application to a wide variety of clinical trials. Medical statisticians engaged in any investigations planned with interim analyses will find this book a useful and important tool.

All phenomena in nature are characterized by motion. Mechanics deals with the objective laws of mechanical motion of bodies, the simplest form of motion. In the study of a science of nature, mathematics plays an important role. Mechanics is the first science of nature which has been expressed in terms of mathematics, by considering various mathematical models, associated to phenomena of the surrounding nature. Thus, its development was influenced by the use of a strong mathematical tool. As it was already seen in the first two volumes of the present book, its guideline is precisely the mathematical model of mechanics. The classical models which we refer to are in fact models based on the Newtonian model of mechanics, that is on its five principles, i.e.: the inertia, the forces action, the action and reaction, the independence of the forces action and the initial conditions principle, respectively. Other models, e.g., the model of attraction forces between the particles of a discrete mechanical system, are part of the considered Newtonian model. Kepler's laws brilliantly verify this model in case of velocities much smaller then the light velocity in vacuum."

In the field known as "the mathematical theory of shock waves," very exciting and unexpected developments have occurred in the last few years. Joel Smoller and Blake Temple have established classes of shock wave solutions to the Einstein Euler equations of general relativity; indeed, the mathematical and physical con sequences of these examples constitute a whole new area of research. The stability theory of "viscous" shock waves has received a new, geometric perspective due to the work of Kevin Zumbrun and collaborators, which offers a spectral approach to systems. Due to the intersection of point and essential spectrum, such an ap proach had for a long time seemed out of reach. The stability problem for "in viscid" shock waves has been given a novel, clear and concise treatment by Guy Metivier and coworkers through the use of paradifferential calculus. The L 1 semi group theory for systems of conservation laws, itself still a recent development, has been considerably condensed by the introduction of new distance functionals through Tai-Ping Liu and collaborators; these functionals compare solutions to different data by direct reference to their wave structure. The fundamental prop erties of systems with relaxation have found a systematic description through the papers of Wen-An Yong; for shock waves, this means a first general theorem on the existence of corresponding profiles. The five articles of this book reflect the above developments."

This book covers the topic of eddy current nondestructive evaluation, the most commonly practiced method of electromagnetic nondestructive evaluation (NDE). It emphasizes a clear presentation of the concepts, laws and relationships of electricity and magnetism upon which eddy current inspection methods are founded. The chapters include material on signals obtained using many common eddy current probe types in various testing environments. Introductory mathematical and physical concepts in electromagnetism are introduced in sufficient detail and summarized in the Appendices for easy reference. Worked examples and simple calculations that can be done by hand are distributed throughout the text. These and more complex end-of-chapter examples and assignments are designed to impart a working knowledge of the connection between electromagnetic theory and the practical measurements described. The book is intended to equip readers with sufficient knowledge to optimize routine eddy current NDE inspections, or design new ones. It is useful for graduate engineers and scientists seeking a deeper understanding of electromagnetic methods of NDE than can be found in a guide for practitioners.

This book presents simple interdisciplinary stochastic models meant as a gentle introduction to the field of non-equilibrium statistical physics. It focuses on the analysis of two-state models with cooperative effects, which are versatile enough to be applied to many physical and social systems. The book also explores a variety of mathematical techniques to solve the master equations that govern these models: matrix theory, empty-interval methods, mean field theory, a quantum approach, and mapping onto classical Ising models. The models discussed are at the confluence of nanophysics, biology, mathematics, and the social sciences and provide a pedagogical path toward understanding the complex dynamics of particle self-assembly with the tools of statistical physics.

This volume contains fourteen papers on mathematical problems of flow and transport through porous media presented at the conference held at Oberwolfach, June 21-27, 1992. Among the topics covered are miscible and immiscible displacement, groundwater contamination, reaction-diffusion instabilities and moving boundaries, random and fractal media, microstructure models, homogenization, spatial heterogeneties, inverse problems, degenerate equations. The papers deal with aspects of modelling, mathematical theory, numerical methods and applications in the engineering sciences.

grams of which the objective is given by the ratio of a convex by a positive (over a convex domain) concave function. As observed by Sniedovich (Ref. [102, 103]) most of the properties of fractional pro grams could be found in other programs, given that the objective function could be written as a particular composition of functions. He called this new field C programming, standing for composite concave programming. In his seminal book on dynamic programming (Ref. [104]), Sniedovich shows how the study of such com positions can help tackling non-separable dynamic programs that otherwise would defeat solution. Barros and Frenk (Ref. [9]) developed a cutting plane algorithm capable of optimizing C-programs. More recently, this algorithm has been used by Carrizosa and Plastria to solve a global optimization problem in facility location (Ref. [16]). The distinction between global optimization problems (Ref. [54]) and generalized convex problems can sometimes be hard to establish. That is exactly the reason why so much effort has been placed into finding an exhaustive classification of the different weak forms of convexity, establishing a new definition just to satisfy some desirable property in the most general way possible. This book does not aim at all the subtleties of the different generalizations of convexity, but concentrates on the most general of them all, quasiconvex programming. Chapter 5 shows clearly where the real difficulties appear.

In the paper we propose a model of tax incentives optimization for inve- ment projects with a help of the mechanism of accelerated depreciation. Unlike the tax holidays which influence on effective income tax rate, accelerated - preciation affects on taxable income. In modern economic practice the state actively use for an attraction of - vestment into the creation of new enterprises such mechanisms as accelerated depreciation and tax holidays. The problem under our consideration is the following. Assume that the state (region) is interested in realization of a certain investment project, for ex- ple, the creation of a new enterprise. In order to attract a potential investor the state decides to use a mechanism of accelerated tax depreciation. The foll- ing question arise. What is a reasonable principle for choosing depreciation rate? From the state's point of view the future investor's behavior will be rat- nal. It means that while looking at economic environment the investor choose such a moment for investment which maximizes his expected net present value (NPV) from the given project. For this case both criteria and "investment rule" depend on proposed (by the state) depreciation policy. For the simplicity we will suppose that the purpose of the state for a given project is a maximi- tion of a discounted tax payments into the budget from the enterprise after its creation. Of course, these payments depend on the moment of investor's entry and, therefore, on the depreciation policy established by the state.

This textbook covers a broad spectrum of developments in QFT, emphasizing those aspects that are now well consolidated and for which satisfactory theoretical descriptions have been provided. The book is unique in that it offers a new approach to the subject and explores many topics merely touched upon, if covered at all, in standard reference works. A detailed and largely non-technical introductory chapter traces the development of QFT from its inception in 1926. The elegant functional differential approach put forward by Schwinger, referred to as the quantum dynamical (action) principle, and its underlying theory are used systematically in order to generate the so-called vacuum-to-vacuum transition amplitude of both abelian and non-abelian gauge theories, in addition to Feynman's well-known functional integral approach, referred to as the path-integral approach. Given the wealth of information also to be found in the abelian case, equal importance is put on both abelian and non-abelian gauge theories. Particular emphasis is placed on the concept of a quantum field and its particle content to provide an appropriate description of physical processes at high energies, where relativity becomes indispensable. Moreover, quantum mechanics implies that a wave function renormalization arises in the QFT field independent of any perturbation theory - a point not sufficiently emphasized in the literature. The book provides an overview of all the fields encountered in present high-energy physics, together with the details of the underlying derivations. Further, it presents "deep inelastic" experiments as a fundamental application of quantum chromodynamics. Though the author makes a point of deriving points in detail, the book still requires good background knowledge of quantum mechanics, including the Dirac Theory, as well as elements of the Klein-Gordon equation. The present volume sets the language, the notation and provides additional background for reading Quantum Field Theory II - Introduction to Quantum Gravity, Supersymmetry and String Theory, by the same author. Students in this field might benefit from first reading the book Quantum Theory: A Wide Spectrum (Springer, 2006), by the same author.

Along with the traditional material concerning linear programming (the simplex method, the theory of duality, the dual simplex method), In-Depth Analysis of Linear Programming contains new results of research carried out by the authors. For the first time, the criteria of stability (in the geometrical and algebraic forms) of the general linear programming problem are formulated and proved. New regularization methods based on the idea of extension of an admissible set are proposed for solving unstable (ill-posed) linear programming problems. In contrast to the well-known regularization methods, in the methods proposed in this book the initial unstable problem is replaced by a new stable auxiliary problem. This is also a linear programming problem, which can be solved by standard finite methods. In addition, the authors indicate the conditions imposed on the parameters of the auxiliary problem which guarantee its stability, and this circumstance advantageously distinguishes the regularization methods proposed in this book from the existing methods. In these existing methods, the stability of the auxiliary problem is usually only presupposed but is not explicitly investigated. In this book, the traditional material contained in the first three chapters is expounded in much simpler terms than in the majority of books on linear programming, which makes it accessible to beginners as well as those more familiar with the area.

The second volume of this work contains Parts 2 and 3 of the "Handbook of Coding Theory". Part 2, "Connections", is devoted to connections between coding theory and other branches of mathematics and computer science. Part 3, "Applications", deals with a variety of applications for coding.

Mathematical Programming and Financial Objectives for Scheduling Projects focuses on decision problems where the performance is measured in terms of money. As the title suggests, special attention is paid to financial objectives and the relationship of financial objectives to project schedules and scheduling. In addition, how schedules relate to other decisions is treated in detail. The book demonstrates that scheduling must be combined with project selection and financing, and that scheduling helps to give an answer to the planning issue of the amount of resources required for a project. The author makes clear the relevance of scheduling to cutting budget costs. The book is divided into six parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to project management. Part two examines scheduling projects in order to maximize their net present value. Part three considers capital rationing. Many decisions on selecting or rejecting a project cannot be made in isolation and multiple projects must be taken fully into account. Since the requests for capital resources depend on the schedules of the projects, scheduling taken on more complexity. Part four studies the resource usage of a project in greater detail. Part five discusses cases where the processing time of an activity is a decision to be made. Part six summarizes the main results that have been accomplished.

Increasing demands on the output performance, exhaust emissions, and fuel consumption necessitate the development of a new generation of automotive engine functionality. This monograph is written by a long year developmental automotive engineer and offers a wide coverage of automotive engine control and estimation problems and its solutions. It addresses idle speed control, cylinder flow estimation, engine torque and friction estimation, engine misfire and CAM profile switching diagnostics, as well as engine knock detection. The book provides a wide and well structured collection of tools and new techniques useful for automotive engine control and estimation problems such as input estimation, composite adaptation, threshold detection adaptation, real-time algorithms, as well as the very important statistical techniques. It demonstrates the statistical detection of engine problems such as misfire or knock events and how it can be used to build a new generation of robust engine functionality. This book will be useful for practising automotive engineers, black belts working in the automotive industry as well as for lecturers and students since it provides a wide coverage of engine control and estimation problems, detailed and well structured descriptions of useful techniques in automotive applications and future trends and challenges in engine functionality.

This fifteenth volume of the Poincare Seminar Series, Dirac Matter, describes the surprising resurgence, as a low-energy effective theory of conducting electrons in many condensed matter systems, including graphene and topological insulators, of the famous equation originally invented by P.A.M. Dirac for relativistic quantum mechanics. In five highly pedagogical articles, as befits their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience, this book explains why Dirac matters. Highlights include the detailed "Graphene and Relativistic Quantum Physics", written by the experimental pioneer, Philip Kim, and devoted to graphene, a form of carbon crystallized in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice, from its discovery in 2004-2005 by the future Nobel prize winners Kostya Novoselov and Andre Geim to the so-called relativistic quantum Hall effect; the review entitled "Dirac Fermions in Condensed Matter and Beyond", written by two prominent theoreticians, Mark Goerbig and Gilles Montambaux, who consider many other materials than graphene, collectively known as "Dirac matter", and offer a thorough description of the merging transition of Dirac cones that occurs in the energy spectrum, in various experiments involving stretching of the microscopic hexagonal lattice; the third contribution, entitled "Quantum Transport in Graphene: Impurity Scattering as a Probe of the Dirac Spectrum", given by Helene Bouchiat, a leading experimentalist in mesoscopic physics, with Sophie Gueron and Chuan Li, shows how measuring electrical transport, in particular magneto-transport in real graphene devices - contaminated by impurities and hence exhibiting a diffusive regime - allows one to deeply probe the Dirac nature of electrons. The last two contributions focus on topological insulators; in the authoritative "Experimental Signatures of Topological Insulators", Laurent Levy reviews recent experimental progress in the physics of mercury-telluride samples under strain, which demonstrates that the surface of a three-dimensional topological insulator hosts a two-dimensional massless Dirac metal; the illuminating final contribution by David Carpentier, entitled "Topology of Bands in Solids: From Insulators to Dirac Matter", provides a geometric description of Bloch wave functions in terms of Berry phases and parallel transport, and of their topological classification in terms of invariants such as Chern numbers, and ends with a perspective on three-dimensional semi-metals as described by the Weyl equation. This book will be of broad general interest to physicists, mathematicians, and historians of science.

Researchers working with nonlinear programming often claim "the word is non linear" indicating that real applications require nonlinear modeling. The same is true for other areas such as multi-objective programming (there are always several goals in a real application), stochastic programming (all data is uncer tain and therefore stochastic models should be used), and so forth. In this spirit we claim: The word is multilevel. In many decision processes there is a hierarchy of decision makers, and decisions are made at different levels in this hierarchy. One way to handle such hierar chies is to focus on one level and include other levels' behaviors as assumptions. Multilevel programming is the research area that focuses on the whole hierar chy structure. In terms of modeling, the constraint domain associated with a multilevel programming problem is implicitly determined by a series of opti mization problems which must be solved in a predetermined sequence. If only two levels are considered, we have one leader (associated with the upper level) and one follower (associated with the lower level)."

This thesis discusses two key topics: strangeness and charge symmetry violation (CSV) in the nucleon. It also provides a pedagogical introduction to chiral effective field theory tailored to the high-precision era of lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Because the nucleon has zero net strangeness, strange observables give tremendous insight into the nature of the vacuum; they can only arise through quantum fluctuations in which strange-antistrange quark pairs are generated. As a result, the precise values of these quantities within QCD are important in physics arenas as diverse as precision tests of QCD, searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, and the interpretation of dark matter direct-detection experiments. Similarly, the precise knowledge of CSV observables has, with increasing experimental precision, become essential to the interpretation of many searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. In this thesis, the numerical lattice gauge theory approach to QCD is combined with the chiral perturbation theory formalism to determine strange and CSV quantities in a diverse range of observables including the octet baryon masses, sigma terms, electromagnetic form factors, and parton distribution functions. This thesis builds a comprehensive and coherent picture of the current status of understanding of strangeness and charge symmetry violation in the nucleon.

This book presents the basic algorithms, the main theoretical results, and some applications of spectral methods. Particular attention is paid to the applications of spectral methods to nonlinear problems arising in fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, weather prediction, heat conduction and other fields.The book consists of three parts. The first part deals with orthogonal approximations in Sobolev spaces and the stability and convergence of approximations for nonlinear problems, as the mathematical foundation of spectral methods. In the second part, various spectral methods are described, with some applications. It includes Fourier spectral method, Legendre spectral method, Chebyshev spectral method, spectral penalty method, spectral vanishing viscosity method, spectral approximation of isolated solutions, multi-dimensional spectral method, spectral method for high-order equations, spectral-domain decomposition method and spectral multigrid method. The third part is devoted to some recent developments of spectral methods, such as mixed spectral methods, combined spectral methods and spectral methods on the surface.

Since the early 1960s, the mathematical theory of variational inequalities has been under rapid development, based on complex analysis and strongly influenced by 'real-life' application. Many, but of course not all, moving free (Le., a priori un known) boundary problems originating from engineering and economic applica tions can directly, or after a transformation, be formulated as variational inequal ities. In this work we investigate an evolutionary variational inequality with a memory term which is, as a fixed domain formulation, the result of the application of such a transformation to a degenerate moving free boundary problem. This study includes mathematical modelling, existence, uniqueness and regularity results, numerical analysis of finite element and finite volume approximations, as well as numerical simulation results for applications in polymer processing. Essential parts of these research notes were developed during my work at the Chair of Applied Mathematics (LAM) of the Technical University Munich. I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to K. -H. Hoffmann, the head of this chair and the present scientific director of the Center of Advanced European Studies and Research (caesar), for his encouragement and support. With this work I am fol lowing a general concept of Applied Mathematics to which he directed my interest and which, based on application problems, comprises mathematical modelling, mathematical and numerical analysis, computational aspects and visualization of simulation results."

Mathematical Visualization is a young new discipline. It offers efficient visualization tools to the classical subjects of mathematics, and applies mathematical techniques to problems in computer graphics and scientific visualization. Originally, it started in the interdisciplinary area of differential geometry, numerical mathematics, and computer graphics. In recent years, the methods developed have found important applications.
The current volume is the quintessence of an international workshop in September 1997 in Berlin, focusing on recent developments in this emerging area. Experts present selected research work on new algorithms for visualization problems, describe the application and experiments in geometry, and develop new numerical or computer graphical techniques.