Vasile Berinde – författare

We present here the English version of the Romanian first edition (V. Berinde: Ex­ plorare, investigare si descoperire in matematica, Editura Efemeride, Baia Mare, 2001). There are no major changes. Only a few printing errors were corrected. When transcribing Romanian names or denominations we did not use the diacrit­ ical marks. Our purpose is to provide an introduction to creative problem solving tech­ niques with particular emphasis on how to develop inventive skills in students. We present an array of 24 carefully selected themes that range over all the main chapters in elementary mathematics: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, analysis as well as applied mathematics. Main goal is to offer a systematic illustration of how to organize the natural transition from problem solving activity toward exploring, investigating and discovering new facts and results. The book is addressed mainly to students, young mathematicians, and teach­ ers, involved or/and actively working in mathematics competitions and training gifted people. It collects many valuable techniques for solving various classes of difficult problems and, simultaneously, offers a comprehensive introduction to cre­ ating new problems. The book should also be of interest to anybody who is in any way connected to mathematics or interested in the creative process and in mathematics as an art.

The aim of this monograph is to give a unified introductory treatment of the most important iterative methods for constructing fixed points of nonlinear contractive type mappings. It summarizes the most significant contributions in the area by presenting, for each iterative method considered (Picard iteration, Krasnoselskij iteration, Mann iteration, Ishikawa iteration etc.), some of the most relevant, interesting, representative and actual convergence theorems. Applications to the solution of nonlinear operator equations as well as the appropriate error analysis of the main iterative methods, are also presented. Due to the explosive number of research papers on the topic (in the last 15 years only, more than one thousand articles related to the subject were published), it was felt that such a monograph was imperatively necessary. The volume is useful for authors, editors, and reviewers. It introduces concrete criteria for evaluating and judging the plethora of published papers.