Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics – serie

These lectures emphasized specific areas of operations research and the mathematics used in modeling and solving the related problems. The lecturers were: Seth Bonder, Ralph L. Disney, Frederick C. Johnson, William P. Pierskalla, Robert B. Rovinsky, Warren E. Walker. Each lecturer attempted to make his presentation self-contained in terms of defining the application areas and mathematics employed.

The theory of networks is a very lively one, both in terms of developments in the theory itself and of the variety of its applications. This book, based on the 1981 AMS Short Course on the Mathematics of Networks, introduces most of the basic ideas of network theory and develops some of these ideas considerably. A number of more specialized topics are introduced, including areas of active research and a wide variety of applications. Frank Boesch gives the basic definitions in the mathematics of networks and in the closely-related topic of graph theory. He discusses two of the most fundamental network problems - the shortest path problem and the minimum spanning tree problem as well as some of their variants.Boesch also gives an interesting presentation in the area of network reliability. Frances Yao considers maximum flows in networks, the problem most often thought of in connection with the mathematics of networks. Richard Karp gives an account of the computational complexity of network problems. Using the case study method, Shen Lin demonstrates the effective use of heuristic algorithms in network design. Four applications of the mathematics of networks are presented by Daniel Kleitman. These include: the design of irrigation systems, the theory of electrical networks, the scheduling of delivery trucks, and the physics of ice. Finally, Nicholas Pippenger presents a chapter on telephone switching networks, an area of network theory that leads to difficult mathematics drawn from such apparently unrelated fields as harmonic analysis.

The lecture notes contained in this volume were presented at the AMS Short Course on Population Biology, held August 6-7, 1983, in Albany, New York in conjunction with the summer meeting of the American Mathematical Society. These notes will acquaint the reader with the mathematical ideas that pervade almost every level of thinking in population biology and provide an introduction to the many applications of mathematics in the field.Research mathematicians, college teachers of mathematics, and graduate students all should find this book of interest. Population biology is probably the oldest area in mathematical biology, but remains a constant source of new mathematical problems and the area of biology best integrated with mathematical theory. The need for mathematical approaches has never been greater, as evolutionary theory is challenged by new interpretations of the paleontological record and new discoveries at the molecular level, as world resources for feeding populations become limiting, as the problems of pollution increase, and as both animal and plant epidemiological problems receive closer scrutiny. A background of advanced calculus, introduction to ordinary and partial differential equations, and linear algebra will make the book accessible. All of the papers included have high research value. A list of the contents follows.

This collection of six papers provides a valuable source of material on the real-world problem of allocating objects among competing claimants. The examples given show how mathematics, particularly the axiomatic method, can be applied to give insight into complex social problems. Originally presented as an AMS Short Course, these papers could serve as a suitable text for courses touching on game theory, decision sciences, economics, or quantitative political science. Most of the material is accessible to the mathematically mature undergraduate with a background in advanced calculus and algebra. Each article surveys the recent literature and includes statements and sketches of proofs, as well as unsolved problems which should excite student curiosity.The articles analyze the question of fair allocation via six examples: the apportionment of political representation, the measurement of income inequality, the allocation of joint costs, the levying of taxes, the design of voting laws, and the framing of auction procedures. In each of these examples fairness has a somewhat different significance, but common axiomatic threads reveal broad underlying principles. Each of the topics is concerned with norms of comparative equity for evaluating allocations or with standards of procedures for effecting them; it is this focus on normative properties which suggests that a mathematical analysis is appropriate. Though game theory provides a useful tool in many of these allocation problems, the emphasis here is on standards rather than strategy and equity rather than rationality, an approach which more accurately mirrors real-world social problems.

Computational complexity theory is the study of the quantitative laws that govern computing. During the last 25 years, this field has grown into a rich mathematical theory. Currently one of the most active research areas in computer science, complexity theory is of considerable interest to mathematicians as well, since some of the key open problems in this field raise basic questions about the nature of mathematics. Many experts in complexity theory believe that, in coming decades, the strongest influence on the development of mathematics will come from the extended use of computing and from concepts and problems arising in computer science.This volume contains the proceedings of the AMS Short Course on Computational Complexity Theory, held at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta in January 1988. The purpose of the short course was to provide an overview of complexity theory and to describe some of the current developments in the field. The papers presented here represent contributions by some of the top experts in this burgeoning area of research.

This volume contains the proceedings of a highly successful AMS Short Course on Chaos and Fractals, held during the AMS Centennial Celebration in Providence, Rhode Island in August 1988. Chaos and fractals have been the subject of great interest in recent years and have proven to be useful in a variety of areas of mathematics and the sciences. The purpose of the short course was to provide a solid introduction to the mathematics underlying the notions of chaos and fractals. The papers in this book range over such topics as dynamical systems theory, Julia sets, the Mandelbrot set, attractors, the Smale horseshoe, calculus on fractals, and applications to data compression. The authors represented here are some of the top experts in this field. Aimed at beginning graduate students, college and university mathematics instructors, and non-mathematics researchers, this book provides readable expositions of several exciting topics of contemporary research.

In the last fifteen years, the Mandelbrot set has emerged as one of the most recognizable objects in mathematics. While there is no question of its beauty, relatively few people appreciate the fact that the mathematics behind such images is equally beautiful. This book presents lectures delivered during the AMS Short Course entitled 'Complex Dynamical Systems: The Mathematics Behind the Mandelbrot and Julia Sets', held at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Cincinnati in January 1994.The lectures cover a wide range of topics, including the classical work of Julia and Fatou on local dynamics of analytic maps as well as recent work on the dynamics of quadratic and cubic polynomials, the geometry of Julia sets, and the structure of various parameter spaces. Among the other topics are recent results on Yoccoz puzzles and tableaux, limiting dynamics near parabolic points, the spider algorithm, extensions of the theory to rational maps, Newton's method, and entire transcendental functions. Much of the book is accessible to anyone with a background in the basics of dynamical systems and complex analysis.

One of the great mathematicians of this century, Norbert Wiener was a universal thinker of colossal proportions. This book contains the proceedings of the Norbert Wiener Centenary Congress held at Michigan State University on November 27 - December 3, 1994. The aim of the Congress was to reveal the depth and strong coherence of thought that runs through Wiener's legacy, and to exhibit its continuation in ongoing research.This volume brings together the great minds who have furthered Wiener's ideas in physics, stochastics, harmonic analysis, philosophy, prosthesis and cybernetics. The presentations coherently lay out the developments of the subjects from their inception. This volume provides an excellent pathway for new investigators who may wish to pursue these developments by following the footsteps of world experts. There is no other book available in which experts in the various fields in which Weiner worked have presented his thoughts and contributions in such a coherent and lucid manner.

There exists a history of great expectations and large investments involving Artificial Intelligence (AI). There are also notable shortfalls and memorable disappointments. One major controversy regarding AI is just how mathematical a field it is or should be. This text includes contributions that examine the connections between AI and mathematics, demonstrating the potential for mathematical applications and exposing some of the more mathematical areas within AI.The goal is to stimulate interest in people who can contribute to the field or use its results. Included is work by M. Newborn on the famous Deep Blue chess match. He discusses highly mathematical techniques involving graph theory, combinatorics and probability and statistics. G. Shafer offers his development of probability through probability trees with some of the results appearing here for the first time. M. Golumbic treats temporal reasoning with ties to the famous Frame Problem.His contribution involves logic, combinatorics and graph theory and leads to two chapters with logical themes. H. Kirchner explains how ordering techniques in automated reasoning systems make deduction more efficient. Constraint logic programming is discussed by C. Lassez, who shows its intimate ties to linear programming with crucial theorems going back to Fourier. V. Nalwa's work provides a brief tour of computer vision, tying it to mathematics-from combinatorics, probability and geometry to partial differential equations. All authors are gifted expositors and are current contributors to the field. The wide scope of the volume includes research problems, research tools and good motivational material for teaching.

Lax and Nirenberg are two of the most distinguished mathematicians of our times. Their work on partial differential equations (PDEs) over the last half-century has dramatically advanced the subject and has profoundly influenced the course of mathematics. A huge part of the development in PDEs during this period has either been through their work, motivated by it or achieved by their postdocs and students. A large number of mathematicians honored these two exceptional scientists in a week-long conference in Venice (June 1996) on the occasion of their 70th birthdays. This volume contains the proceedings of the conference, which focused on the modern theory of nonlinear PDEs and their applications. Among the topics treated are turbulence, kinetic models of a rarefied gas, vortex filaments, dispersive waves, singular limits and blow-up of solutions, conservation laws, Hamiltonian systems, and others.The conference served as a forum for the dissemination of new scientific ideas and discoveries and enhanced scientific communication by bringing together such a large number of scientists working in related fields. The event allowed the international mathematics community to honor two of its outstanding members.

The foundation for the subject of mathematical finance was laid nearly 100 years ago by Bachelier in his fundamental work, ""Theorie de la speculation"". In this work, he provided the first treatment of Brownian motion. Since then, the research of Markowitz, and then of Black, Merton, Scholes, and Samuelson brought remarkable and important strides in the field. A few years later, Harrison and Kreps demonstrated the fundamental role of martingales and stochastic analysis in constructing and understanding models for financial markets. The connection opened the door for a flood of mathematical developments and growth. Concurrently with these mathematical advances, markets have grown, and developments in both academia and industry continue to expand.This lively activity inspired an AMS Short Course at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego (CA). The present volume includes the written results of that course. Articles are featured by an impressive list of recognized researchers and practitioners. Their contributions present deep results, pose challenging questions, and suggest directions for future research. This collection offers compelling introductory articles on this new, exciting, and rapidly growing field.

To understand multiscale phenomena, it is essential to employ asymptotic methods to construct approximate solutions and to design effective computational algorithms. This volume consists of articles based on the AMS Short Course in Singular Perturbations held at the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore (MD). Leading experts discussed the following topics which they expand upon in the book: boundary layer theory, matched expansions, multiple scales, geometric theory, computational techniques, and applications in physiology and dynamic metastability. Readers will find that this text offers an up-to-date survey of this important field with numerous references to the current literature, both pure and applied.

This book presents written versions of the eight lectures given during the AMS Short Course held at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, D.C. The objective of this course was to share with the scientific community the many exciting mathematical challenges arising from the new field of quantum computation and quantum information science. The course was geared toward demonstrating the great breadth and depth of this mathematically rich research field. Interrelationships with existing mathematical research areas were emphasized as much as possible. Moreover, the course was designed so that participants with little background in quantum mechanics would, upon completion, be prepared to begin reading the research literature on quantum computation and quantum information science.Based on audience feedback and questions, the written versions of the lectures have been greatly expanded, and supplementary material has been added. The book features an overview of relevant parts of quantum mechanics with an introduction to quantum computation, including many potential quantum mechanical computing devices; introduction to quantum algorithms and quantum complexity theory; in-depth discussion on quantum error correcting codes and quantum cryptography; and, finally, exploration into diverse connections between quantum computation and various areas of mathematics and physics. This book is the companion volume to ""Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, CONM/305"", Volume 305 in the ""Contemporary Mathematics"" series.

Symbolic dynamics originated as a tool for analyzing dynamical systems and flows by discretizing space as well as time. The development of information theory gave impetus to the study of symbol sequences as objects in their own right. Today, symbolic dynamics has expanded to encompass multi-dimensional arrays of symbols and has found diverse applications both within and beyond mathematics. This volume is based on the AMS Short Course on Symbolic Dynamics and its Applications. It contains introductory articles on the fundamental ideas of the field and on some of its applications.Topics include the use of symbolic dynamics techniques in coding theory and in complex dynamics, the relation between the theory of multi-dimensional systems and the dynamics of tilings, and strong shift equivalence theory. Contributors to the volume are experts in the field and are clear expositors. The book is suitable for graduate students and research mathematicians interested in symbolic dynamics and its applications.

This collection of articles grew out of an expository and tutorial conference on public-key cryptography held at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (Baltimore). The book provides an introduction and survey on public-key cryptography for those with considerable mathematical maturity and general mathematical knowledge. Its goal is to bring visibility to the cryptographic issues that fall outside the scope of standard mathematics. These mathematical expositions are intended for experienced mathematicians who are not well acquainted with the subject. The book is suitable for graduate students, researchers, and engineers interested in mathematical aspects and applications of public-key cryptography.

This volume presents proceedings from the AMS short course, Trends in Optimization 2004, held at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Phoenix (AZ). It focuses on seven exciting areas of discrete optimization. In particular, Karen Aardal describes Lovasz's fundamental algorithm for producing a short vector in a lattice by basis reduction and H. W. Lenstra's use of this idea in the early 1980s in his polynomial-time algorithm for integer programming in fixed dimension. Aardal's article, 'Lattice basis reduction in optimization: Selected Topics', is one of the most lucid presentations of the material.It also contains practical developments using computational tools. Bernd Sturmfels' article, 'Algebraic recipes for integer programming', discusses how methods of commutative algebra and algebraic combinatorics can be used successfully to attack integer programming problems. Specifically, Grobner bases play a central role in algorithmic theory and practice. Moreover, it is shown that techniques based on short rational functions are bringing new insights, such as in computing the integer programming gap. Overall, these articles, together with five other contributions, make this volume an impressive compilation on the state-of-the-art of optimization. It is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in discrete optimization.

Since their emergence in 1917, tomography and inverse problems remain active and important fields that combine pure and applied mathematics and provide strong interplay between diverse mathematical problems and applications. The applied side is best known for medical and scientific use, in particular, medical imaging, radiotherapy, and industrial non-destructive testing. Doctors use tomography to see the internal structure of the body or to find functional information, such as metabolic processes, noninvasively. Scientists discover defects in objects, the topography of the ocean floor, and geological information using X-rays, geophysical measurements, sonar, or other data.This volume, based on the lectures in the Short Course The Radon Transform and Applications to Inverse Problems at the American Mathematical Society meeting in Atlanta, GA, January 3-4, 2005, brings together articles on mathematical aspects of tomography and related inverse problems. The articles cover introductory material, theoretical problems, and practical issues in 3-D tomography, impedance imaging, local tomography, wavelet methods, regularization and approximate inverse, sampling, and emission tomography. All contributions are written for a general audience, and the authors have included references for further reading.

The articles of this book are written by leading experts in partial differential equations and their applications, who present overviews here of recent advances in this broad area of mathematics. The formation of shocks in fluids, modern numerical computation of turbulence, the breaking of the Einstein equations in a vacuum, the dynamics of defects in crystals, effects due to entropy in hyperbolic conservation laws, the Navier-Stokes and other limits of the Boltzmann equation, occupancy times for Brownian motion in a two dimensional wedge, and new methods of analyzing and solving integrable systems are some of this volume's subjects. The reader will find an exposition of important advances without a lot of technicalities and with an emphasis on the basic ideas of this field.

Over the past 20-30 years, knot theory has rekindled its historic ties with biology, chemistry, and physics as a means of creating more sophisticated descriptions of the entanglements and properties of natural phenomena - from strings to organic compounds to DNA. This volume is based on the 2008 AMS Short Course, Applications of Knot Theory. The aim of the Short Course and this volume, while not covering all aspects of applied knot theory, is to provide the reader with a mathematical appetizer, in order to stimulate the mathematical appetite for further study of this exciting field. No prior knowledge of topology, biology, chemistry, or physics is assumed. In particular, the first three chapters of this volume introduce the reader to knot theory (by Colin Adams), topological chirality and molecular symmetry (by Erica Flapan), and DNA topology (by Dorothy Buck). The second half of this volume is focused on three particular applications of knot theory. Louis Kauffman discusses applications of knot theory to physics, Nadrian Seeman discusses how topology is used in DNA nanotechnology, and Jonathan Simon discusses the statistical and energetic properties of knots and their relation to molecular biology.

'The International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems: Theory, Numerics and Applications', 'HYP2008', was held at the University of Maryland from June 9-14, 2008. This was the twelfth meeting in the bi-annual international series of HYP conferences which originated in 1986 at Saint-Etienne, France, and over the last twenty years has become one of the highest quality and most successful conference series in Applied Mathematics. The articles in this two-part volume are written by leading researchers as well as promising young scientists and cover a diverse range of multi-disciplinary topics addressing theoretical, modeling and computational issues arising under the umbrella of 'hyperbolic PDEs'. This volume will bring readers to the forefront of research in this most active and important area in applied mathematics.

The International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems: Theory, Numerics and Applications, 'HYP2008', was held at the University of Maryland from June 9-13, 2008. This was the twelfth meeting in the bi-annual international series of HYP conferences which originated in 1986 at Saint-Etienne, France, and over the last twenty years has become one of the highest quality and most successful conference series in Applied Mathematics. This book, the first in a two-part volume, contains nineteen papers based on plenary and invited talks presented at the conference. These original research and review papers written by leading experts as well as promising young scientists represent the state-of-the-art research frontiers in hyperbolic equations and related problems, ranging from theoretical analysis to algorithm development and applications in physical sciences and engineering. This volume will bring readers to the forefront of research in this most active and important area in applied mathematics.

This volume is based on lectures delivered at the 2009 AMS Short Course on Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, held January 3-4, 2009, in Washington, D.C. Part I of this volume consists of two papers giving introductory surveys of many of the important topics in the newly emerging field of quantum computation and quantum information, i.e., quantum information science (QIS). The first paper discusses many of the fundamental concepts in QIS and ends with the curious and counter-intuitive phenomenon of entanglement concentration. The second gives an introductory survey of quantum error correction and fault tolerance, QIS's first line of defence against quantum decoherence. Part II consists of four papers illustrating how QIS research is currently contributing to the development of new research directions in mathematics. The first paper illustrates how differential geometry can be a fundamental research tool for the development of compilers for quantum computers. The second paper gives a survey of many of the connections between quantum topology and quantum computation. The last two papers give an overview of the new and emerging field of quantum knot theory, an interdisciplinary research field connecting quantum computation and knot theory. These two papers illustrate surprising connections with a number of other fields of mathematics. In the appendix, an introductory survey article is also provided for those readers unfamiliar with quantum mechanics.