Alexander Vasil'ev – författare

This volume highlights the main results of the research performed within the network “Harmonic and Complex Analysis and its Applications” (HCAA), which was a five-year (2007–2012) European Science Foundation Programme intended to explore and to strengthen the bridge between two scientific communities: analysts with broad backgrounds in complex and harmonic analysis and mathematical physics, and specialists in physics and applied sciences. It coordinated actions for advancing harmonic and complex analysis and for expanding its application to challenging scientific problems. Particular topics considered by this Programme included conformal and quasiconformal mappings, potential theory, Banach spaces of analytic functions and their applications to the problems of fluid mechanics, conformal field theory, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics, and signal processing. This book is a collection of surveys written as a result of activities of the Programme and will be interesting and useful for professionals and novices in analysis and mathematical physics, as well as for graduate students. Browsing the volume, the reader will undoubtedly notice that, as the scope of the Programme is rather broad, there are many interrelations between the various contributions, which can be regarded as different facets of a common theme.

This monograph covers a multitude of concepts, results, and research topics originating from a classical moving-boundary problem in two dimensions (idealized Hele-Shaw flows, or classical Laplacian growth), which has strong connections to many exciting modern developments in mathematics and theoretical physics. Of particular interest are the relations between Laplacian growth and the infinite-size limit of ensembles of random matrices with complex eigenvalues; integrable hierarchies of differential equations and their spectral curves; classical and stochastic Löwner evolution and critical phenomena in two-dimensional statistical models; weak solutions of hyperbolic partial differential equations of singular-perturbation type; and resolution of singularities for compact Riemann surfaces with anti-holomorphic involution. The book also provides an abundance of exact classical solutions, many explicit examples of dynamics by conformal mapping as well as a solid foundation of potential theory. An extensive bibliography covering over twelve decades of results and an introduction rich in historical and biographical details complement the eight main chapters of this monograph.

 Given its systematic and consistent notation and background results, this book provides a self-contained resource. It is accessible to a wide readership, from beginner graduate students to researchers from various fields in natural sciences and mathematics.