Lecture Notes Series, Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore – serie

Understanding how a single shape can incur a complex range of transformations, while defining the same perceptually obvious figure, entails a rich and challenging collection of problems, at the interface between applied mathematics, statistics and computer science. The program on Mathematics of Shapes and Applications, was held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore in 2016. It provided discussions on theoretical developments and numerous applications in computer vision, object recognition and medical imaging.The analysis of shapes is an example of a mathematical problem directly connected with applications while offering deep open challenges to theoretical mathematicians. It has grown, over the past decades, into an interdisciplinary area in which researchers studying infinite-dimensional Riemannian manifolds (global analysis) interact with applied mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists and biomedical engineers on a variety of problems involving shapes.The volume illustrates this wealth of subjects by providing new contributions on the metric structure of diffeomorphism groups and shape spaces, recent developments on deterministic and stochastic models of shape evolution, new computational methods manipulating shapes, and new statistical tools to analyze shape datasets. In addition to these contributions, applications of shape analysis to medical imaging and computational anatomy are discussed, leading, in particular, to improved understanding of the impact of cognitive diseases on the geometry of the brain.

Interacting particle systems are Markov processes involving infinitely many interacting components. Since their introduction in the 1970s, researchers have found many applications in statistical physics and population biology. Genealogies, which follow the origin of the state of a site backwards in time, play an important role in their studies, especially for the biologically motivated systems.The program Genealogies of Interacting Particle Systems held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore, from 17 July to 18 Aug 2017, brought together experts and young researchers interested in this modern topic. Central to the program were learning sessions where lecturers presented work outside of their own research, as well as a normal workshop. This is reflected in the present volume which contains two types of articles:Written by respected researchers, including experts in the field such as Steve Evans, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, as well as Anton Wakolbinger, Andreas Greven, and many others, this volume will no doubt be a valuable contribution to the probability community.

The Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore hosted a thematic program on Quantum and Kinetic Problems: Modeling, Analysis, Numerics and Applications from September 2019 to March 2020. As an important part of the program, tutorials and special lectures were given by leading experts in the fields for participating graduate students and junior researchers. This invaluable volume collects six expanded lecture notes with self-contained tutorials. The coverage includes mathematical models and numerical methods for multidimensional solitons in linear and nonlinear potentials; Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) with dipole-dipole interaction, higher order interaction and spin-orbit coupling; classical and quantum turbulence; and molecular dynamics process based on the first-principle in quantum chemistry.This volume serves to inspire graduate students and researchers who will embark into original research work in these fields.

The thematic program Quantum and Kinetic Problems: Modeling, Analysis, Numerics and Applications was held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore, from September 2019 to March 2020. Leading experts presented tutorials and special lectures geared towards the participating graduate students and junior researchers.Readers will find in this significant volume four expanded lecture notes with self-contained tutorials on modeling and simulation for collective dynamics including individual and population approaches for population dynamics in mathematical biology, collective behaviors for Lohe type aggregation models, mean-field particle swarm optimization, and consensus-based optimization and ensemble Kalman inversion for global optimization problems with constraints.This volume serves to inspire graduate students and researchers who will embark into original research work in kinetic models for collective dynamics and their applications.

Density Functional Theory (DFT) first established it's theoretical footing in the 1960s from the framework of Hohenberg-Kohn theorems. DFT has since seen much development in evaluation techniques as well as application in solving problems in Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry.This review volume, part of the IMS Lecture Notes Series, is a collection of contributions from the September 2019 Workshop on the topic, held in the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore.With contributions from prominent Mathematicians, Physicists, and Chemists, the volume is a blend of comprehensive review articles on the Mathematical and the Physicochemical aspects of DFT and shorter contributions on particular themes, including numerical implementations.The book will be a useful reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers.

This volume results from two programs that took place at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore: Aspects of Computation — in Celebration of the Research Work of Professor Rod Downey (21 August to 15 September 2017) and Automata Theory and Applications: Games, Learning and Structures (20-24 September 2021).The first program was dedicated to the research work of Rodney G. Downey, in celebration of his 60th birthday. The second program covered automata theory whereby researchers investigate the other end of computation, namely the computation with finite automata, and the intermediate level of languages in the Chomsky hierarchy (like context-free and context-sensitive languages).This volume contains 17 contributions reflecting the current state-of-art in the fields of the two programs.

This is a collection of lecture notes from the minicourses in the December 2018 Langlands Workshop: Endoscopy and Beyond. The volume combines seven introductory chapters on trace formulas, local Arthur packets, and beyond endoscopy. It aims to introduce the endoscopy classification via a basic example of the trace formula for SL(2), explore the more refined questions on the structure of Arthur packets, and look beyond endoscopy following the suggestions of Langlands, Braverman-Kazhdan, Ngo, and Altuğ. The book is a helpful reference for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers.

The Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore hosted a research program on “Representation Theory of Lie Groups” from July 2002 to January 2003. As part of the program, tutorials for graduate students and junior researchers were given by leading experts in the field.This invaluable volume collects the expanded lecture notes of those tutorials. The topics covered include uncertainty principles for locally compact abelian groups, fundamentals of representations of p-adic groups, the Harish-Chandra-Howe local character expansion, classification of the square-integrable representations modulo cuspidal data, Dirac cohomology and Vogan's conjecture, multiplicity-free actions and Schur-Weyl-Howe duality.The lecturers include Tomasz Przebinda from the University of Oklahoma, USA; Gordan Savin from the University of Utah, USA; Stephen DeBacker from Harvard University, USA; Marko Tadić from the University of Zagreb, Croatia; Jing-Song Huang from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong; Pavle Pandǽić from the University of Zagreb, Croatia; Chal Benson and Gail Ratcliff from East Carolina University, USA; and Roe Goodman from Rutgers University, USA.

Stein's startling technique for deriving probability approximations first appeared about 30 years ago. Since then, much has been done to refine and develop the method, but it is still a highly active field of research, with many outstanding problems, both theoretical and in applications. This volume, the proceedings of a workshop held in honour of Charles Stein in Singapore, August 2003, contains contributions from many of the mathematicians at the forefront of this effort. It provides a cross-section of the work currently being undertaken, with many pointers to future directions. The papers in the collection include applications to the study of random binary search trees, Brownian motion on manifolds, Monte-Carlo integration, Edgeworth expansions, regenerative phenomena, the geometry of random point sets, and random matrices.

This volume documents the research carried out by visiting scientists attached to the Institute for Mathematical Sciences (IMS) at the National University of Singapore and the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) under the program “Advances and Mathematical Issues in Large Scale Simulation.” From 2002 to 2003, researchers from various countries gathered to initiate interesting and innovative work on various themes related to multiscale simulation and fast algorithms.Today, modeling and simulation are used extensively to solve complex problems and to reduce the use of experimentation during the design and analysis stage. It is important to know the various issues that have to be considered in the successful development of computational methodologies for such work.This volume is a compilation of the research by various visiting scientists in the area of modeling and multiscale simulation. Each article covers a major project and documents how computational methodology, mathematical modeling, high performance computing and simulation are combined in a multiscale scheme to solve a variety of complex problems. Some of these include the design, synthesis, processing, characterization and manufacture of nanomaterials and nanostructures, new algorithms for computational work, and grid computing.Through the included examples, readers can realize the vast potential of computational modeling and large scale simulation for the solution of problems in a variety of disciplines and applications.

The Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore hosted a research program on “Nanoscale Material Interfaces: Experiment, Theory and Simulation'' from November 2004 to January 2005. As part of the program, tutorials for graduate students and junior researchers were given by leading experts in the field.This invaluable volume collects the expanded lecture notes of four of those self-contained tutorials. The topics covered include dynamics in different models of domain coarsening and coagulation and their mathematical analysis in material sciences; a mathematical and computational study for quantized vortices in the celebrated Ginzburg-Landau models of superconductivity and the mean field Gross-Pitaevskii equations of superfluidity; the nonlinear Schrödinger equation and applications in Bose-Einstein condensation and plasma physics as well as their efficient and accurate computation; and finally, an introduction to constitutive modeling of macromolecular fluids within the framework of the kinetic theory.This volume serves to inspire graduate students and researchers who will embark upon original research work in these fields.

This volume carries the same title as that of an international conference held at the National University of Singapore, 9-11 January 2006 on the occasion of Roger E. Howe's 60th birthday. Authored by leading members of the Lie theory community, these contributions, expanded from invited lectures given at the conference, are a fitting tribute to the originality, depth and influence of Howe's mathematical work. The range and diversity of the topics will appeal to a broad audience of research mathematicians and graduate students interested in symmetry and its profound applications.

This volume is a collection of written versions of the talks given at the Workshop on Computational Prospects of Infinity, held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences from 18 June to 15 August 2005. It consists of contributions from many of the leading experts in recursion theory (computability theory) and set theory. Topics covered include the structure theory of various notions of degrees of unsolvability, algorithmic randomness, reverse mathematics, forcing, large cardinals and inner model theory, and many others.

The Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore hosted a research program on Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases: Dynamics and Control from 15 August to 9 October 2005. As part of the program, tutorials for graduate students and junior researchers were given by leading experts in the field.This invaluable volume is a collection of three expanded lecture notes of those tutorials which cover a wide range of topics including basic mathematical details for various epidemic models, statistical distribution theory, and applications with real-life examples with implications for health policy makers.

This volume showcases lecture notes collected from tutorials presented at the Workshop on Moving Interface Problems and Applications in Fluid Dynamics that was held between January 8 and March 31, 2007 at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore. As part of the program, these tutorials were conducted by specialists within their respective areas such as Robert Dillon, Zhilin Li, John Lowengrub, Frank Lu and Gretar Tryggvason.The topics in the program encompass modeling and simulations of biological flow coupled to deformable tissue/elastic structure, shock wave and bubble dynamics and various applications like biological treatments with experimental verification, multi-medium flow or multiphase flow and various applications including cavitation/supercavitation, detonation problems, Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid, and many other areas.This volume benefits graduate students and researchers keen in the field of interfacial flows for application to physical and biological systems. Even beginners will find this volume a very useful starting point with many relevant references applicable.

This volume contains three expanded lecture notes from the program Scalar Curvature in Manifold Topology and Conformal Geometry that was held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences from 1 November to 31 December 2014. The first chapter surveys the recent developments on the fourth-order equations with negative exponent from geometric points of view such as positive mass theorem and uniqueness results. The next chapter deals with the recent important progress on several conjectures such as the existence of non-flat smooth hyper-surfaces and Serrin's over-determined problem. And the final chapter induces a new technique to handle the equation with critical index and the sign change coefficient as well as the negative index term. These topics will be of interest to those studying conformal geometry and geometric partial differential equations.

Mathemusical Conversations celebrates the understanding of music through mathematics, and the appreciation of mathematics through music. This volume is a compilation of the invited talks given at the Mathemusical Conversations workshop that took place in Singapore from 13-15 February 2015, organized by Elaine Chew in partnership with Gérard Assayag for the scientific program and with Bernard Lanskey for the artistic program. The contributors are world experts and leading scholars, writing on the intersection of music and mathematics. They also focus on performance and composition, two topics which are foundational both to the understanding of human creativity and to the creation of tomorrow's music technologies. This book is essential reading for researchers in both music and mathematics. It will also appeal more broadly to scholars, students, musicians, and anyone interested in new perspectives on the intimate relationship between these two universal human activities.

The contents in this volume are based on the program Sets and Computations that was held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore from 30 March until 30 April 2015. This special collection reports on important and recent interactions between the fields of Set Theory and Computation Theory. This includes the new research areas of computational complexity in set theory, randomness beyond the hyperarithmetic, powerful extensions of Goodstein's theorem and the capturing of large fragments of set theory via elementary-recursive structures.Further chapters are concerned with central topics within Set Theory, including cardinal characteristics, Fraïssé limits, the set-generic multiverse and the study of ideals. Also Computation Theory, which includes computable group theory and measure-theoretic aspects of Hilbert's Tenth Problem. A volume of this broad scope will appeal to a wide spectrum of researchers in mathematical logic.

This volume is to pique the interest of many researchers in the fields of infinite dimensional analysis and quantum probability. These fields have undergone increasingly significant developments and have found many new applications, in particular, to classical probability and to different branches of physics. These fields are rather wide and are of a strongly interdisciplinary nature. For such a purpose, we strove to bridge among these interdisciplinary fields in our Workshop on IDAQP and their Applications that was held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore from 3-7 March 2014. Readers will find that this volume contains all the exciting contributions by well-known researchers in search of new directions in these fields.

This volume consists of introductory lectures on the topics in the new and rapidly developing area of toric homotopy theory, and its applications to the current research in configuration spaces and braids, as well as to more applicable mathematics such as fr-codes and robot motion planning.The book starts intertwining homotopy theoretical and combinatorial ideas within the remits of toric topology and illustrates an attempt to classify in a combinatorial way polytopes known as fullerenes, which are important objects in quantum physics, quantum chemistry and nanotechnology. Toric homotopy theory is then introduced as a further development of toric topology, which describes properties of Davis-Januszkiewicz spaces, moment-angle complexes and their generalizations to polyhedral products. The book also displays the current research on configuration spaces, braids, the theory of limits over the category of presentations and the theory of fr-codes. As an application to robotics, the book surveys topological problems relevant to the motion planning problem of robotics and includes new results and constructions, which enrich the emerging area of topological robotics.The book is at research entry level addressing the core components in homotopy theory and their important applications in the sciences and thus suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

In the 25 years since their introduction, Higgs bundles have seen a surprising number of interactions within different areas of mathematics and physics. There is a recent surge of interest following Ngô Bau Châu's proof of the Fundamental Lemma and the work of Kapustin and Witten on the Geometric Langlands program. The program on The Geometry, Topology and Physics of Moduli Spaces of Higgs Bundles, was held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore during 2014. It hosted a number of lectures on recent topics of importance related to Higgs bundles, and it is the purpose of this volume to collect these lectures in a form accessible to graduate students and young researchers interested in learning more about this field.

Random matrix theory has a long history, beginning in the first instance in multivariate statistics. It was used by Wigner to supply explanations for the important regularity features of the apparently random dispositions of the energy levels of heavy nuclei. The subject was further deeply developed under the important leadership of Dyson, Gaudin and Mehta, and other mathematical physicists.In the early 1990s, random matrix theory witnessed applications in string theory and deep connections with operator theory, and the integrable systems were established by Tracy and Widom. More recently, the subject has seen applications in such diverse areas as large dimensional data analysis and wireless communications.This volume contains chapters written by the leading participants in the field which will serve as a valuable introduction into this very exciting area of research.

This book is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to familarize themselves with research in braid groups, configuration spaces and their applications. Starting at the beginning, and assuming only basic topology and group theory, the volume's noted expositors take the reader through the fundamental theory and on to current research and applications in fields as varied as astrophysics, cryptography and robotics. As leading researchers themselves, the authors write enthusiastically about their topics, and include many striking illustrations. The chapters have their origins in tutorials given at a Summer School on Braids, at the National University of Singapore's Institute for Mathematical Sciences in June 2007, to an audience of more than thirty international graduate students.

The Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore hosted a Spring School on Fluid Dynamics and Geophysics of Environmental Hazards from 19 April to 2 May 2009. This volume contains the content of the nine short lecture courses given at this School, with a focus mainly on tropical cyclones, tsunamis, monsoon flooding and atmospheric pollution, all within the context of climate variability and change.The book provides an introduction to these topics from both mathematical and geophysical points of view, and will be invaluable for graduate students in applied mathematics, geophysics and engineering with an interest in this broad field of study, as well as for seasoned researchers in adjacent fields.

Quantum theory is one of the most important intellectual developments in the early twentieth century. The confluence of mathematics and quantum physics emerged arguably from Von Neumann's seminal work on the spectral theory of linear operators. This volume arose from a two-month workshop held at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore in July-September 2008 on mathematical physics, focusing specifically on operator algebras in quantum theory.This volume is essentially written for graduate students and young researchers so that they can acquire a gentle introduction to the application of operator algebras to quantum information sciences, chaotic and many-body problems. Several lecture notes delivered during the workshop by experts in the field were specially commissioned for this volume.

The Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore hosted a two-month research program on “Mathematical Theory and Numerical Methods for Computational Materials Simulation and Design” from 1 July to 31 August 2009. As an important part of the program, tutorials and special lectures were given by leading experts in the fields for participating graduate students and junior researchers.This invaluable volume collects four expanded lecture notes with self-contained tutorials. They cover a number of aspects on multiscale modeling, analysis and simulations for problems arising from materials science including some critical components in computational prediction of materials properties such as the multiscale properties of complex materials, properties of defects, interfaces and material microstructures under different conditions, critical issues in developing efficient numerical methods and analytic frameworks for complex and multiscale materials models.This volume serves to inspire graduate students and researchers who choose to embark into original research work in these fields.

The Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore hosted a Spring School on Fluid Dynamics and Geophysics of Environmental Hazards from 19 April to 2 May 2009. This volume contains the content of the nine short lecture courses given at this School, with a focus mainly on tropical cyclones, tsunamis, monsoon flooding and atmospheric pollution, all within the context of climate variability and change.The book provides an introduction to these topics from both mathematical and geophysical points of view, and will be invaluable for graduate students in applied mathematics, geophysics and engineering with an interest in this broad field of study, as well as for seasoned researchers in adjacent fields.

This volume is based on lectures given at the highly successful three-week Summer School on Geometry, Topology and Dynamics of Character Varieties held at the National University of Singapore's Institute for Mathematical Sciences in July 2010.Aimed at graduate students in the early stages of research, the edited and refereed articles comprise an excellent introduction to the subject of the program, much of which is otherwise available only in specialized texts. Topics include hyperbolic structures on surfaces and their degenerations, applications of ping-pong lemmas in various contexts, introductions to Lorenzian and complex hyperbolic geometry, and representation varieties of surface groups into PSL(2, ℝ) and other semi-simple Lie groups. This volume will serve as a useful portal to students and researchers in a vibrant and multi-faceted area of mathematics.

This volume is based on lectures given during the program “Complex Quantum Systems” held at the National University of Singapore's Institute for Mathematical Sciences from 17 February to 27 March 2010. It guides the reader through two introductory expositions on large Coulomb systems to five of the most important developments in the field: derivation of mean field equations, derivation of effective Hamiltonians, alternative high precision methods in quantum chemistry, modern many-body methods originating from quantum information, and — the most complex — semirelativistic quantum electrodynamics.These introductions are written by leaders in their fields; amongst them are Volker Bach, Rafael Benguria, Thomas Chen, and Jan Philip Solovej. Together, they fill a gap between current textbooks and the vast modern literature on complex quantum systems.