This is a state-of-the-art introduction to the work of Franz Reidemeister, Meng Taubes, Turaev, and the author on the concept of torsion and its generalizations. Torsion is the oldest topological (but not with respect to homotopy) invariant that in its almost eight decades of existence has been at the center of many important and surprising discoveries. During the past decade, in the work of Vladimir Turaev, new points of view have emerged, which turned out to be the "right ones" as far as gauge theory is concerned. The book features mostly the new aspects of this venerable concept. The theoretical foundations of this subject are presented in a style accessible to those, who wish to learn and understand the main ideas of the theory. Particular emphasis is upon the many and rather diverse concrete examples and techniques which capture the subleties of the theory better than any abstract general result. Many of these examples and techniques never appeared in print before, and their choice is often justified by ongoing current research on the topology of surface singularities. The text is addressed to mathematicians with geometric interests who want to become comfortable users of this versatile invariant.

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.

Eleven carefully selected, peer-reviewed contributions from the Virtual Conference on Computational Science (VCCS-2016) are featured in this edited book of proceedings. VCCS-2016, an annual meeting, was held online from 1st to 31st August 2016. The theme of the conference was "Computational Thinking for the Advancement of Society" and it matched the paradigm shift in the way we think. VCCS-2016 was attended by 100 participants from 20 countries. The chapters reflect a wide range of fundamental and applied research applying computational methods.

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.

This work provides the current theory and observations behind the cosmological phenomenon of dark energy. The approach is comprehensive with rigorous mathematical theory and relevant astronomical observations discussed in context. The book treats the background and history starting with the new-found importance of Einstein's cosmological constant (proposed long ago) in dark energy formulation, as well as the frontiers of dark energy. The authors do not presuppose advanced knowledge of astronomy, and basic mathematical concepts used in modern cosmology are presented in a simple, but rigorous way. All this makes the book useful for both astronomers and physicists, and also for university students of physical sciences.

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.

Computer science and physics have been closely linked since the birth of modern computing. In recent years, an interdisciplinary area has blossomed at the junction of these fields, connecting insights from statistical physics with basic computational challenges. Researchers have successfully applied techniques from the study of phase transitions to analyze NP-complete problems such as satisfiability and graph coloring. This is leading to a new understanding of the structure of these problems, and of how algorithms perform on them.
Computational Complexity and Statistical Physics will serve as a standard reference and pedagogical aid to statistical physics methods in computer science, with a particular focus on phase transitions in combinatorial problems. Addressed to a broad range of readers, the book includes substantial background material along with current research by leading computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists. It will prepare students and researchers from all of these fields to contribute to this exciting area.

To describe the true behavior of most real-world systems with sufficient accuracy, engineers have to overcome difficulties arising from their lack of knowledge about certain parts of a process or from the impossibility of characterizing it with absolute certainty. Depending on the application at hand, uncertainties in modeling and measurements can be represented in different ways. For example, bounded uncertainties can be described by intervals, affine forms or general polynomial enclosures such as Taylor models, whereas stochastic uncertainties can be characterized in the form of a distribution described, for example, by the mean value, the standard deviation and higher-order moments.

The goal of this Special Volume on "Modeling, Design, and Simulation of Systems with Uncertainties" is to cover modern methods for dealing with the challenges presented by imprecise or unavailable information. All contributions tackle the topic from the point of view of control, state and parameter estimation, optimization and simulation.

Thematically, this volume can be divided into two parts. In the first we present works highlighting the theoretic background and current research on algorithmic approaches in the field of uncertainty handling, together with their reliable software implementation. The second part is concerned with real-life application scenarios from various areas including but not limited to mechatronics, robotics, and biomedical engineering.

On August 1997 a conference titled "From Local to Global Optimiza- tion" was held at Storgarden in Rimfor.sa near the Linkoping Institute of Technology, Sweden. The conference gave us the opportunity to cel- ebrate Hoang Thy's achievements in Optimization during his 70 years of life. This book consists of a collection of research papers based on results presented during the conference and are dedicated to Professor Hoang Thy on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The papers cover a wide range of recent results in Mathematical Pro- gramming. The work of Hoang Thy, in particular in Global Optimiza- tion, has provided directions for new algorithmic developments in the field. We are indebted to the Kluwer Academic Publishers for inviting us to publish this volume, and the Center for Industrial Information Transfer (CENIIT) for financial support. We wish to thank the referees for their help and the authors for their papers. We also wish to join all contributors of this book in expressing birthday wishes and gratitude to Hoang Thy for his inspiration, support, and friendship to all of us. Athanasios Migdalas, Panos M. Pardalos, and Peter Varbrand November 1998 xv Hoang Tuy: An Appreciation Its a pleasure for me as colleague and friend to take this opportunity to celebrate Hoang 'I\lY'S numerous contributions to the field of mathemat- ical programming.

This volume consists of eight papers on new advances in interpolation theory for matrix functions and completion theory for matrices and operators. Much emphasis is placed on different interpolation and completion problems when the interpolant is estimated in two different norms. The book also focusses on the study of the spectra of different completions of 2 x 2 block matrices when originally all entries are specified except the lower left corner. A third theme concerns two-sided tangential interpolation problems for real rational matrix functions, and also for the time varying case. A tangential moment problem is also analyzed. All papers deal with related problems of modern matrix analysis, operator theory, complex analysis and system theory and will appeal to a wide group of mathematicians and engineers. The material can be used for advance courses and seminars. Contents: Editorial Introduction ? D. Alpay/P. Loubaton: The tangential trigonometric moment problem on an interval and related topics ? M. Bakonyi/V.G. Kaftal/G. Weiss/H.J. Woerdeman: Maximum entropy and joint norm bounds for operator extensions ? J.A. Ball/I. Gohberg/M.A. Kaashoek: Bitangential interpolation for input-output operators of time varying systems: the discrete time case ? J.A. Ball/I. Gohberg/L. Rodman: Two-sided tangential interpolation of real rational matrix functions ? H. Du/C. Gu: On the spectra of operator completion problems ? C. Foias/A.E. Frazho/W.S. Li: The exact H2 estimate for the central H interpolant ? A.E. Frazho/s.M. Kherat: On mixed H2 - H tangential interpolation ? I. Gohberg/C.Gu: On a completion problem for matrices

This volume of papers presented at the conference in honor of Calixto P. Calderon by his friends, colleagues, and students is intended to make the mathematical community aware of his important scholarly and research contributions in contemporary Harmonic Analysis and Mathematical Models applied to Biology and Medicine, and to stimulate further research in the future in this area of pure and applied mathematics.

The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of a new mathematical tool, called wavlet analysis, for analyzing complex signals. It has begin to play a serious role in applications ranging from communications to geophysics, and from simulations to image processing. Like Fourier analysis (of which it is a generalization), or musical notation, wavelet analysis provides a method for representing a set of complex phenomena in a simpler, more compact, and thus more efficient manner. This text introduces the ideas and methods of wavelet analysis, relates them to previously known methods in mathematics and engineering, and shows how to apply wavelet analysis to digital signal processing. It begins by describing the multiscale (sometimes called "fractal") nature of information in many aspects of thereal world; it then turns to the algebra and analysis of wavelet matrices, scaling and wavelet functions, and the corresponding analysis of square-integrable functins on a space. The discussion then turns from the continuous to the discrete and shows how a properly selected set of wavelets can be used to represent -- and even differentiate -- a wide range of signls efficiently and effectively. The last part of the book presents a wide variety of applications of wavelets to probllems in data compression and telecommunications.

Agent-Based Computer Simulation of Dichotomous Economic Growth reports a project in agent-based computer stimulation of processes of economic growth in a population of boundedly rational learning agents. The study is an exercise in comparative simulation. That is, the same family of growth models will be simulated under different assumptions about the nature of the learning process and details of the production and growth processes. The purpose of this procedure is to establish a relationship between the assumptions and the simulation results. The study brings together a number of theoretical and technical developments, only some of which may be familiar to any particular reader. In this first chapter, some issues in economic growth are reviewed and the objectives of the study are outlined. In the second chapter, the simulation techniques are introduced and illustrated with baseline simulations of boundedly rational learning processes that do not involve the complications of dealing with long-run economic growth. The third chapter sketches the consensus modern theory of economic growth which is the starting point for further study. In the fourth chapter, a family of steady growth models are simulated, bringing the simulation, growth and learning aspects of the study together. In subsequent chapters, variants on the growth model are explored in a similar way. The ninth chapter introduces trade, with a spacial trading model that is combined with the growth model in the tenth chapter. The book returns again and again to the key question: to what extent can the simulations explain' the puzzles of economic growth, and particularly the key puzzle of dichotomization, by constructing growth and learning processes that produce the puzzling results? And just what assumptions of the simulations are most predictable associated with the puzzling results?

This book combining wavelets and the world of the spectrum focuses on recent developments in wavelet theory, emphasizing fundamental and relatively timeless techniques that have a geometric and spectral-theoretic flavor. The exposition is clearly motivated and unfolds systematically, aided by numerous graphics.This self-contained book deals with important applications to signal processing, communications engineering, computer graphics algorithms, qubit algorithms and chaos theory, and is aimed at a broad readership of graduate students, practitioners, and researchers in applied mathematics and engineering. The book is also useful for other mathematicians with an interest in the interface between mathematics and communication theory.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar - known simply as Chandra throughout the scientific world - has become a legendary figure for his prolific contributions to physics, astrophysics, and applied mathematics. Before his death in 1995, Chandra had forbidden a memorial of the conventional sort, celebrating his life. This book, which contains some thirty articles by his former students, his associates, and his colleagues, is in a sense a memorial volume. It says little about Chandra's great scientific achievements, but shows his human side and the various facets of his brilliant personality, his incredible memory, his wit, and the breadth of his knowledge of art, music, literature, and the humanities in general. The contributors to this highly interesting book are among the few who broke the seemingly forbidden barrier surrounding the very private Chandra and came to know him well in one context or another. They include Lalitha Chandrasekhar, Roger Penrose, Richard H Dalitz, J W Cronin, Robert G Sachs, Abhay Ashtekar, and Robert Wald.

The Kronecker product of matrices plays a central role in mathematics and in applications found in engineering and theoretical physics. These applications are signal processing, statistical physics, quantum groups and quantum computers. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the Kronecker product of matrices together with its software implementation in C++ using an object-oriented design.

Statistical methods have become an increasingly important and integral part of research in the health sciences. Many sophisticated methodologies have been developed for specific applications and problems. This self-contained volume, an outgrowth of an International Conference on Statistics in Health Sciences, covers a wide range of topics pertaining to new statistical methods in the health sciences. The chapters, written by leading experts in their respective fields, are thematically divided into the following areas: prognostic studies and general epidemiology, pharmacovigilance, quality of life, survival analysis, clustering, safety and efficacy assessment, clinical design, models for the environment, genomic analysis, and animal health. This comprehensive volume will serve the health science community as well as practitioners, researchers, and graduate students in applied probability, statistics, and biostatistics.

The book deals with the numerical simulation of noise in semiconductor devices operating in linear (small-signal) and nonlinear (large-signal) conditions. The main topics of the book are: An overview of the physical basis of noise in semiconductor devices, a detailed treatment of numerical noise simulation in small-signal conditions, and a presentation of innovative developments in the noise simulation of semiconductor devices operating in large-signal quasi-periodic conditions. The main benefit that the reader will derive from the book is the ability to understand, and, if needed, replicate the development of numerical, physics-based noise simulation of semiconductor devices in small-signal and large-signal conditions.

This and the previous volume of the OT series contain the proceedings of the Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications, IWOTA 95, which was held at the University of Regensburg, Germany, July 31 to August 4, 1995. It was the eigth workshop of this kind. Following is a list of the seven previous workshops with reference to their proceedings: 1981 Operator Theory (Santa Monica, California, USA) 1983 Applications of Linear Operator Theory to Systems and Networks (Rehovot, Israel), OT 12 1985 Operator Theory and its Applications (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), OT 19 1987 Operator Theory and Functional Analysis (Mesa, Arizona, USA), OT 35 1989 Matrix and Operator Theory (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), OT 50 1991 Operator Theory and Complex Analysis (Sapporo, Japan), OT 59 1993 Operator Theory and Boundary Eigenvalue Problems (Vienna, Austria), OT 80 IWOTA 95 offered a rich programme on a wide range of latest developments in operator theory and its applications. The programme consisted of 6 invited plenary lectures, 54 invited special topic lectures and more than 100 invited session talks. About 180 participants from 25 countries attended the workshop, more than a third came from Eastern Europe. The conference covered different aspects of linear and nonlinear spectral prob lems, starting with problems for abstract operators up to spectral theory of ordi nary and partial differential operators, pseudodifferential operators, and integral operators. The workshop was also focussed on operator theory in spaces with indefinite metric, operator functions, interpolation and extension problems."