Mathematics Without Boundaries

The contributions in this volume have been written by eminent scientists from the international mathematical community and present significant advances in several theories, methods and problems of Mathematical Analysis, Discrete Mathematics, Geometry and their Applications. The chapters focus on both old and recent developments in Functional Analysis, Harmonic Analysis, Complex Analysis, Operator Theory, Combinatorics, Functional Equations, Differential Equations as well as a variety of Applications. The book also contains some review works, which could prove particularly useful for a broader audience of readers in Mathematical Sciences, and especially to graduate students looking for the latest information.

At its meeting in April 1990 at the University of Cambridge, the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) decided that the largely unorganized archives of the Union should be properly arranged and catalogued. Simultaneously, the Executive Committee expressed the wish that a history of the Union should be written [1). As Secretary of the Union, I had proposed that these issues be dis cussed at the Cambridge meeting, but without having had in mind any personal role in the practical execution of such projects. At that time, the papers of the IMU were stored in Zurich, at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, and I saw no reason why they could not remain there. At about this time, Professor K. Chandrasekharan produced a handwritten article titled "The Prehistory of the International Mathematical Union" [2), and it seemed to me that this might serve as the beginning of a more compre hensive history. I had first thought that Tuulikki MakeUiinen, who during eight years as the Office Secretary ofthe IMU had become well acquainted with the Union, would do the arranging of the archives in Zurich. She had a preliminary look at the material there, but it soon became clear that the amount of work required to bring order to it was too great to be accomplished in a few short visits from Helsinki. The total volume of material was formidable.

This volume consists of chapters written by eminent scientists and engineers from the international community and present significant advances in several theories, methods and applications of an interdisciplinary research. These contributions focus on both old and recent developments of Global Optimization Theory, Convex Analysis, Calculus of Variations, Discrete Mathematics and Geometry, as well as several applications to a large variety of concrete problems, including applications of computers to the study of smoothness and analyticity of functions, applications to epidemiological diffusion, networks, mathematical models of elastic and piezoelectric fields, optimal algorithms, stability of neutral type vector functional differential equations, sampling and rational interpolation for non-band-limited signals, recurrent neural network for convex optimization problems and experimental design. The book also contains some review works, which could prove particularly useful for a broader audience of readers in Mathematical and Engineering subjects and especially to graduate students who search for the latest information.

Indeterminate forms are still an unresovled problem in science. This book provides a contribution to approach to the solution of this problem.

This book is devoted to the analysis of the basic boundary value problems for the Laplace equation in singularly perturbed domains. The main purpose is to illustrate a method called Functional Analytic Approach, to describe the dependence of the solutions upon a singular perturbation parameter in terms of analytic functions. Here the focus is on domains with small holes and the perturbation parameter is the size of the holes. The book is the first introduction to the topic and covers the theoretical material and its applications to a series of problems that range from simple illustrative examples to more involved research results. The Functional Analytic Approach makes constant use of the integral representation method for the solutions of boundary value problems, of Potential Theory, of the Theory of Analytic Functions both in finite and infinite dimension, and of Nonlinear Functional Analysis. Designed to serve various purposes and readerships, the extensive introductory part spanning Chapters 1–7 can be used as a reference textbook for graduate courses on classical Potential Theory and its applications to boundary value problems. The early chapters also contain results that are rarely presented in the literature and may also, therefore, attract the interest of more expert readers. The exposition moves on to introduce the Functional Analytic Approach. A reader looking for a quick introduction to the method can find simple illustrative examples specifically designed for this purpose. More expert readers will find a comprehensive presentation of the Functional Analytic Approach, which allows a comparison between the approach of the book and the more classical expansion methods of Asymptotic Analysis and offers insights on the specific features of the approach and its applications to linear and nonlinear boundary value problems.

This volume presents significant advances in a number of theories and problems of Mathematical Analysis and its applications in disciplines such as Analytic Inequalities, Operator Theory, Functional Analysis, Approximation Theory, Functional Equations, Differential Equations, Wavelets, Discrete Mathematics and Mechanics. The contributions focus on recent developments and are written by eminent scientists from the international mathematical community. Special emphasis is given to new results that have been obtained in the above mentioned disciplines in which Nonlinear Analysis plays a central role. Some review papers published in this volume will be particularly useful for a broader readership in Mathematical Analysis, as well as for graduate students. An attempt is given to present all subjects in this volume in a unified and self-contained manner, to be particularly useful to the mathematical community.