The book consists of solicited articles from a select group of mathematicians and physicists working at the interface between positivity andthe geometry, combinatorics or analysis of polynomials of one or several variables. It is dedicated to the memory of Julius Borcea (1968-2009), a distinguished mathematician, Professor at the University of Stockholm. With his extremely original contributions and broad vision, his impact on the topics of the planned volume cannot be underestimated. All contributors knew or have exchanged ideas with Dr. Borcea, and their articles reflect, at least partially, his heritage."

Advances in the dynamics of stellar systems have been made recently by applying mathematical methods of ergodic theory and chaotic dynamics, by numerous computer simulations, and by observations with the most powerful telescopes. This has led to a considerable change of our view on stellar systems. These systems appear much more chaotic than was previously thought and subject to various instabilities leading to new paths of evolution than previously thought. The implications are fundamental for our views on the evolution of the galaxies and the universe. Such questions are addressed in this book, especially in the 8 review papers by leading experts on various aspects of the N-body problem, explaining at the graduate/postgraduate level the concepts, methods, techniques and results.

Pure and applied stochastic analysis and random fields form the subject of this book. The collection of articles on these topics represent the state of the art of the research in the field, with particular attention being devoted to stochastic models in finance. Some are review articles, others are original papers; taken together, they will apprise the reader of much of the current activity in the area.

Elasticity theory is a classical discipline. The mathematical theory of elasticity in mechanics, especially the linearized theory, is quite mature, and is one of the foundations of several engineering sciences. In the last twenty years, there has been significant progress in several areas closely related to this classical field, this applies in particular to the following two areas. First, progress has been made in numerical methods, especially the development of the finite element method. The finite element method, which was independently created and developed in different ways by sci entists both in China and in the West, is a kind of systematic and modern numerical method for solving partial differential equations, especially el liptic equations. Experience has shown that the finite element method is efficient enough to solve problems in an extremely wide range of applica tions of elastic mechanics. In particular, the finite element method is very suitable for highly complicated problems. One of the authors (Feng) of this book had the good fortune to participate in the work of creating and establishing the theoretical basis of the finite element method. He thought in the early sixties that the method could be used to solve computational problems of solid mechanics by computers. Later practice justified and still continues to justify this point of view. The authors believe that it is now time to include the finite element method as an important part of the content of a textbook of modern elastic mechanics."

Approach your problems from the right It isn't that they can't see the solution. end and begin with the answers. Then It is that they can't see the problem. one day, perhaps you will find the final question. G. K. Chesterton. The Scandal of Father Brown 'The Point of a Pin'. 'The Hermit Clad in Crane Feathers' in R. van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the "tree" of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Min kowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory: quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces."

Since the introduction of the functional classes HW (lI) and WT HW (lI) and their peri- odic analogs Hw (1I') and ~ (1I'), defined by a concave majorant w of functions and their rth derivatives, many researchers have contributed to the area of ex- tremal problems and approximation of these classes by algebraic or trigonometric polynomials, splines and other finite dimensional subspaces. In many extremal problems in the Sobolev class W~ (lI) and its periodic ana- log W~ (1I') an exceptional role belongs to the polynomial perfect splines of degree r, i.e. the functions whose rth derivative takes on the values -1 and 1 on the neighbor- ing intervals. For example, these functions turn out to be extremal in such problems of approximation theory as the best approximation of classes W~ (lI) and W~ (1I') by finite-dimensional subspaces and the problem of sharp Kolmogorov inequalities for intermediate derivatives of functions from W~. Therefore, no advance in the T exact and complete solution of problems in the nonperiodic classes W HW could be expected without finding analogs of polynomial perfect splines in WT HW .

Nonlinear complex open systems show great diversity in the process of self-organization, and that diversity increases as complexity increases. The measurement of complexity and the origins of the diversity of such complex systems are the focus of interdisciplinary studies extending across a wide range of scientific disciplines that include applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, ecology, sociology, and economics. Previous investigations have concentrated either on complexity or on diversity, but not both. This volume makes clear the relation between complexity and diversity with examples drawn from various disciplines. Compiles here are presentations from the Complexity and Diversity workshop held in Fugue, Japan, in August 1996. The contributions are the results of research in mathematical systems, physical systems, living systems, and social systems, and are contained in the four corresponding sections of the book. Mathematical expressions for the theory of complexity as a fundamental method along with realistic examples for application of systematic methods provide the reader with ready access to the latest topics in complex systems.

For about a decade I have made an effort to study quadratic forms in infinite dimensional vector spaces over arbitrary division rings. Here we present in a systematic fashion half of the results found du ring this period, to wit, the results on denumerably infinite spaces (" ~O- forms") . Certain among the resul ts included here had of course been published at the time when they were found, others appear for the first time (the case, for example, in Chapters IX, X, XII where I in clude results contained in the Ph.D.theses by my students w. Allenspach, L. Brand, U. Schneider, M. Studer). If one wants to give an introduction to the geometric algebra of infinite dimensional quadratic spaces, a discussion of ~ -dimensional 0 spaces ideally serves the purpose. First, these spaces show a large nurober of phenomena typical of infinite dimensional spaces. Second, most proofs can be done by recursion which resembles the familiar pro cedure by induction in the finite dimensional Situation. Third, the student acquires a good feeling for the linear algebra in infinite di mensions because it is impossible to camouflage problems by topological expedients (in dimension ~O it is easy to see, in a given case, wheth er topological language is appropriate or not) .

The study of phase transitions is one of the fundamental problems of physics. The goal of this seminar was to understand better the spectacular progress made recently in constructing continuum models. Concentrating on a few examples such as the microstructure of crystals, defects in liquid crystals and liquid-vapor interfaces, several key points are described, for example the structure and evolution of the interfaces, regularization via interfacial energy, and equilibrium theories. The mathematical treatment of these questions involves large-oscillation theories (Young's measures, compensated compactness), spectral theory, admissibility of shock waves, long-time behavior of dynamical systems, high-order perturbations, group actions, solitons, and others.

This book was first published in 2006. Written by two of the foremost researchers in the field, this book studies the local times of Markov processes by employing isomorphism theorems that relate them to certain associated Gaussian processes. It builds to this material through self-contained but harmonized 'mini-courses' on the relevant ingredients, which assume only knowledge of measure-theoretic probability. The streamlined selection of topics creates an easy entrance for students and experts in related fields. The book starts by developing the fundamentals of Markov process theory and then of Gaussian process theory, including sample path properties. It then proceeds to more advanced results, bringing the reader to the heart of contemporary research. It presents the remarkable isomorphism theorems of Dynkin and Eisenbaum and then shows how they can be applied to obtain new properties of Markov processes by using well-established techniques in Gaussian process theory. This original, readable book will appeal to both researchers and advanced graduate students.

This book provides a very readable description of a technique, developed by the author years ago but as current as ever, for proving that solutions to certain (non-elliptic) partial differential equations only have real analytic solutions when the data are real analytic (locally). The technique is completely elementary but relies on a construction, a kind of a non-commutative power series, to localize the analysis of high powers of derivatives in the so-called bad direction. It is hoped that this work will permit a far greater audience of researchers to come to a deep understanding of this technique and its power and flexibility.

Two-armed response-adaptive clinical trials are modelled as Markov decision problems to pursue two overriding objectives: Firstly, to identify the superior treatment at the end of the trial and, secondly, to keep the number of patients receiving the inferior treatment small. Such clinical trial designs are very important, especially for rare diseases. Thomas Ondra presents the main solution techniques for Markov decision problems and provides a detailed description how to obtain optimal allocation sequences.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation with a periodic potential; in particular, the localized modes supported by the periodic potential. It takes the mean-field model of the Bose-Einstein condensation as the starting point of analysis and addresses the existence and stability of localized modes. The mean-field model is simplified further to the coupled nonlinear Schroedinger equations, the nonlinear Dirac equations, and the discrete nonlinear Schroedinger equations. One of the important features of such systems is the existence of band gaps in the wave transmission spectra, which support stationary localized modes known as the gap solitons. These localized modes realise a balance between periodicity, dispersion and nonlinearity of the physical system. Written for researchers in applied mathematics, this book mainly focuses on the mathematical properties of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. It also serves as a reference for theoretical physicists interested in localization in periodic potentials.

Contents and treatment are fresh and very different from the standard treatments Presents a fully constructive version of what it means to do algebra The exposition is not only clear, it is friendly, philosophical, and considerate even to the most naive or inexperienced reader

Pierre Grisvard, one of the most distinguished French mathematicians, died on April 22, 1994. A Conference was held in November 1994 out of which grew the invited articles contained in this volume. All of the papers are related to functional analysis applied to partial differential equations, which was Grisvard's specialty. Indeed his knowledge of this area was extremely broad. He began his career as one of the very first students of Jacques Louis Lions, and in 1965, he presented his "State Thesis" on interpolation spaces, using in particular, spectral theory for linear operators in Banach spaces. After 1970, he became a specialist in the study of optimal regularity for par tial differential equations with boundary conditions. He studied singulari ties coming from coefficients, boundary conditions, and mainly non-smooth domains, and left a legacy of precise results which have been published in journals and books. Pierre Grisvard spent most of his career as a full professor at the University of Nice, where he started in 1967. For shorter or longer periods, he visited several foreign countries, and collaborated with some of the most famous mathematicians in his field. He was also an excellent organizer and directed a large number of Ph.D. students. Finally, this volume contains a bibliography of Grisvard's works as well as one paper which he wrote and which has not been published before."

In this volume selected papers delivered at the special session on "Spectral and scattering theory" are published. This session was organized by A. G. Ramm at the first international congress ofISAAC (International Society for Analysis, Applications and Computing) which was held at the University of Delaware, June 3-7, 1997. The papers in this volume deal with a wide va riety of problems including some nonlinear problems (Schechter, Trenogin), control theory (Shubov), fundamental problems of physics (Kitada), spectral and scattering theory in waveg uides and shallow ocean (Ramm and Makrakis), inverse scattering with incomplete data (Ramm), spectral theory for Sturm-Liouville operators with singular coefficients (Yurko) and with energy-dependent coefficients (Aktosun, Klaus, and van der Mee), spectral theory of SchrOdinger operators with periodic coefficients (Kuchment, Vainberg), resolvent estimates for SchrOdinger-type and Maxwell's operators (Ben-Artzi and Nemirovsky), SchrOdinger oper ators with von Neumann-Wignertype potentials (Rejto and Taboada), principal eigenvalues for indefinite-weight elliptic operators (pinchover), and symmetric solutions of Ginzburg-Landau equations (Gustafson). These papers will be of interest to a wide audience including mathematicians, physicists, and theoretically oriented engineers. A. G. Ramm Manhattan, KS v CONTENTS 1. Wave Scattering in 1-0 Nonconservative Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tuncay Aktosun, Martin Klaus, and Comelis van der Mee 2. Resolvent Estimates for SchrOdinger-type and Maxwell Equations with Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Matania Ben-Artzi and Jonathan Nemirovsky 3. Symmetric Solutions of Ginzburg-Landau Equations 33 S. Gustafson 4. Quantum Mechanics and Relativity: Their Unification by Local Time . . . . . . . 39 Hitoshi Kitada 5."

The present book contains three articles: "Systems of Linear Differential Equations," by V. P. Palamodov; "Fredholm Operators and Their Generalizations," by S. N. Krachkovskii and A. S. Di kanskii; and "Representations of Groups and Algebras in Spaces with an Indefinite Metric" by M. A. Naimark and R. S. Ismagilov. In the fi.rst article the accent is on those characteristics of systems of differential equations which distinguish the systems from the scalar case. Considerable space is devoted in particular to "nonquadratic systems," a topic that has very recently stimulated interest. The second article is devoted to the algebraic aspects of the theory of operators (determinant theory in particular) in Banach and linear topological spaces. The third article reflects the present state of the art in the given area of the theory of representations, which has been re ceiving considerable attention in connection with its applications in physics (particularly in quantum field theory) and in the theory of differential equations."

In the first half of the 19th century geometry changed radically, and withina century it helped to revolutionize both mathematics and physics. It also put the epistemology and the philosophy of science on a new footing. In this volume a sound overview of this development is given by leading mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, and historians of science. This interdisciplinary approach gives this collection a unique character. It can be used by scientists and students, but it also addresses a general readership.

Lagrangian systems constitute a very important and old class in dynamics. Their origin dates back to the end of the eighteenth century, with Joseph-Louis Lagrange s reformulation of classical mechanics. The main feature of Lagrangian dynamics is its variational flavor: orbits are extremal points of an action functional. The development of critical point theory in the twentieth century provided a powerful machinery to investigate existence and multiplicity questions for orbits of Lagrangian systems. This monograph gives a modern account of the application of critical point theory, and more specifically Morse theory, to Lagrangian dynamics, with particular emphasis toward existence and multiplicity of periodic orbits of non-autonomous and time-periodic systems."

This selection of outstanding articles - an outgrowth of the QMath9 meeting for young scientists - covers new techniques and recent results on spectral theory, statistical mechanics, Bose-Einstein condensation, random operators, magnetic Schroedinger operators and more. The book's pedagogical style makes it a useful introduction to the research literature for postgraduate students. For more expert researchers it will serve as a concise source of modern reference.

A long long time ago, echoing philosophical and aesthetic principles that existed since antiquity, William of Ockham enounced the principle of parsimony, better known today as Ockham's razor: "Entities should not be multiplied without neces sity. " This principle enabled scientists to select the "best" physical laws and theories to explain the workings of the Universe and continued to guide scienti?c research, leadingtobeautifulresultsliketheminimaldescriptionlength approachtostatistical inference and the related Kolmogorov complexity approach to pattern recognition. However, notions of complexity and description length are subjective concepts anddependonthelanguage"spoken"whenpresentingideasandresults. The?eldof sparse representations, that recently underwent a Big Bang like expansion, explic itly deals with the Yin Yang interplay between the parsimony of descriptions and the "language" or "dictionary" used in them, and it became an extremely exciting area of investigation. It already yielded a rich crop of mathematically pleasing, deep and beautiful results that quickly translated into a wealth of practical engineering applications. You are holding in your hands the ?rst guide book to Sparseland, and I am sure you'll ?nd in it both familiar and new landscapes to see and admire, as well as ex cellent pointers that will help you ?nd further valuable treasures. Enjoy the journey to Sparseland! Haifa, Israel, December 2009 Alfred M. Bruckstein vii Preface This book was originally written to serve as the material for an advanced one semester (fourteen 2 hour lectures) graduate course for engineering students at the Technion, Israel.

This introduction treats the classical isoperimetric inequality in Euclidean space and contrasting rough inequalities in noncompact Riemannian manifolds. In Euclidean space the emphasis is on a most general form of the inequality sufficiently precise to characterize the case of equality, and in Riemannian manifolds the emphasis is on those qualitiative features of the inequality that provide insight into the coarse geometry at infinity of Riemannian manifolds. The treatment in Euclidean space features a number of proofs of the classical inequality in increasing generality, providing in the process a transition from the methods of classical differential geometry to those of modern geometric measure theory; and the treatment in Riemannian manifolds features discretization techniques, and applications to upper bounds of large time heat diffusion in Riemannian manifolds. The result is an introduction to the rich tapestry of ideas and techniques of isoperimetric inequalities, a subject that has its beginnings in classical antiquity and which continues to inspire fresh ideas in geometry and analysis to this very day--and beyond

The theory of almost-periodic functions with complex values, created by H. Bohr [1] in his two classical papers published in Acta Mathematica in 1925 and 1926, has been developed by many authors and has had note- worthy applications: we recall the works of Weyl, De la Vallee Poussin, Bochner, Stepanov, Wiener, Besicovic, Favard, Delsarte, Maak, Bogoliu- bov, Levitan. This subject has been widely treated in the monographs by Bohr [2], Favard [1], Besicovic [1], Maak [1], Levitan [1], Cinquini [1], Corduneanu [1], [2]. An important class of almost-periodic functions was studied at the beginning of the century by Bohl and Esclangon. Bohr's theory has been extended by Muckenhoupt [1] in a particular case and, subsequently, by Bochner [1] and by Bochner and Von Neumann [1] to very general abstract spaces. The extension to Banach spaces is, in particular, of great interest, in view of the fundamental importance of these spaces in theory and application.

The purpose of this book is to give an introduction to the Laplace transform on the undergraduate level. The material is drawn from notes for a course taught by the author at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Based on classroom experience, an attempt has been made to (1) keep the proofs short, (2) introduce applications as soon as possible, (3) concentrate on problems that are difficult to handle by the older classical methods, and (4) emphasize periodic phenomena. To make it possible to offer the course early in the curriculum (after differential equations), no knowledge of complex variable theory is assumed. However, since a thorough study of Laplace. transforms requires at least the rudiments of this theory, Chapter 3 includes a brief sketch of complex variables, with many of the details presented in Appendix A. This plan permits an introduction of the complex inversion formula, followed by additional applications. The author has found that a course taught three hours a week for a quarter can be based on the material in Chapters 1, 2, and 5 and the first three sections of Chapter 7. If additional time is available (e.g., four quarter-hours or three semester-hours), the whole book can be covered easily. The author is indebted to the students at the Milwaukee School of Engineering for their many helpful comments and criticisms.

Coding theory, system theory, and symbolic dynamics have much in common. A major new theme in this area of research is that of codes and systems based on graphical models. This volume contains survey and research articles from leading researchers at the interface of these subjects.