This volume gives an up-to-date review of the subject Integration in Finite Terms. The book collects four significant texts together with an extensive bibliography and commentaries discussing these works and their impact. These texts, either out of print or never published before, are fundamental to the subject of the book. Applications in combinatorics and physics have aroused a renewed interest in this well-developed area devoted to finding solutions of differential equations and, in particular, antiderivatives, expressible in terms of classes of elementary and special functions.

From the reviews: "This is a great book, which will hopefully become a classic in the subject of differential Galois theory. ...] the specialist, as well as the novice, have long been missing an introductory book covering also specific and advanced research topics. This gap is filled by the volume under review, and more than satisfactorily." Mathematical Reviews

This book lays the algebraic foundations of a Galois theory of linear difference equations and shows its relationship to the analytic problem of finding meromorphic functions asymptotic to formal solutions of difference equations. Classically, this latter question was attacked by Birkhoff and Tritzinsky and the present work corrects and greatly generalizes their contributions. In addition results are presented concerning the inverse problem in Galois theory, effective computation of Galois groups, algebraic properties of sequences, phenomena in positive characteristics, and q-difference equations. The book is aimed at advanced graduate researchers and researchers.

This volume gives an up-to-date review of the subject Integration in Finite Terms. The book collects four significant texts together with an extensive bibliography and commentaries discussing these works and their impact. These texts, either out of print or never published before, are fundamental to the subject of the book. Applications in combinatorics and physics have aroused a renewed interest in this well-developed area devoted to finding  solutions of differential equations and, in particular, antiderivatives, expressible in terms of classes of elementary and special functions.