András Recski – författare

This is the second volume of the procedings of the second European Congress of Mathematics. Volume I presents the speeches delivered at the Congress, the list of lectures, and short summaries of the achievements of the prize winners. Together with volume II it contains a collection of contributions by the invited lecturers. Finally, volume II also presents reports on some of the Round Table discussions. This two-volume set thus gives an overview of the state of the art in many fields of mathematics and is therefore of interest to every professional mathematician. Contributors: Vol. I: N. Alon, L. Ambrosio, K. Astala, R. Benedetti, Ch. Bessenrodt, F. Bethuel, P. Bjørstad, E. Bolthausen, J. Bricmont, A. Kupiainen, D. Burago, L. Caporaso, U. Dierkes, I. Dynnikov, L.H. Eliasson, W.T. Gowers, H. Hedenmalm, A. Huber, J. Kaczorowski, J. Kollár, D.O. Kramkov, A.N. Shiryaev, C. Lescop, R. März. Vol. II: J. Matousek, D. McDuff, A.S. Merkurjev, V. Milman, St. Müller, T. Nowicki, E. Olivieri, E. Scoppola, V.P. Platonov, J. Pöschel, L. Polterovich , L. Pyber, N. Simányi, J.P. Solovej, A. Stipsicz, G. Tardos, J.-P. Tignol, A.P. Veselov, E. Zuazua.

I. The topics of this book The concept of a matroid has been known for more than five decades. Whitney (1935) introduced it as a common generalization of graphs and matrices. In the last two decades, it has become clear how important the concept is, for the following reasons: (1) Combinatorics (or discrete mathematics) was considered by many to be a collection of interesting, sometimes deep, but mostly unrelated ideas. However, like other branches of mathematics, combinatorics also encompasses some gen­ eral tools that can be learned and then applied, to various problems. Matroid theory is one of these tools. (2) Within combinatorics, the relative importance of algorithms has in­ creased with the spread of computers. Classical analysis did not even consider problems where "only" a finite number of cases were to be studied. Now such problems are not only considered, but their complexity is often analyzed in con­ siderable detail. Some questions of this type (for example, the determination of when the so called "greedy" algorithm is optimal) cannot even be answered without matroidal tools.