Complementarity, duality, and symmetry are closely related concepts, and have always been a rich source of inspiration in human understanding through the centuries, particularly in mathematics and science. The Proceedings of IUTAM Symposium on Complementarity, Duality, and Symmetry in Nonlinear Mechanics brings together some of world's leading researchers in both mathematics and mechanics to provide an interdisciplinary but engineering flavoured exploration of the field's foundation and state of the art developments. Topics addressed in this book deal with fundamental theory, methods, and applications of complementarity, duality and symmetry in multidisciplinary fields of nonlinear mechanics, including nonconvex and nonsmooth elasticity, dynamics, phase transitions, plastic limit and shakedown analysis of hardening materials and structures, bifurcation analysis, entropy optimization, free boundary value problems, minimax theory, fluid mechanics, periodic soliton resonance, constrained mechanical systems, finite element methods and computational mechanics. A special invited paper presented important research opportunities and challenges of the theoretical and applied mechanics as well as engineering materials in the exciting information age. Audience: This book is addressed to all scientists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians, as well as advanced students (doctoral and post-doctoral level) at universities and in industry.

Calculus Without Derivatives expounds the foundations and recent advances in nonsmooth analysis, a powerful compound of mathematical tools that obviates the usual smoothness assumptions. This textbook also provides significant tools and methods towards applications, in particular optimization problems. Whereas most books on this subject focus on a particular theory, this text takes a general approach including all main theories. In order to be self-contained, the book includes three chapters of preliminary material, each of which can be used as an independent course if needed. The first chapter deals with metric properties, variational principles, decrease principles, methods of error bounds, calmness and metric regularity. The second one presents the classical tools of differential calculus and includes a section about the calculus of variations. The third contains a clear exposition of convex analysis.

This book presents several aspects of research on mathematics that have significant applications in engineering, modelling and social matters, discussing a number of current and future social issues and problems in which mathematical tools can be beneficial. Each chapter enhances our understanding of the research problems in a particular an area of study and highlights the latest advances made in that area. The self-contained contributions make the results and problems discussed accessible to readers, and provides references to enable those interested to follow subsequent studies in still developing fields. Presenting real-world applications, the book is a valuable resource for graduate students, researchers and educators. It appeals to general readers curious about the practical applications of mathematics in diverse scientific areas and social problems.

This book on canonical duality theory provides a comprehensive review of its philosophical origin, physics foundation, and mathematical statements in both finite- and infinite-dimensional spaces. A ground-breaking methodological theory, canonical duality theory can be used for modeling complex systems within a unified framework and for solving a large class of challenging problems in multidisciplinary fields in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences. This volume places a particular emphasis on canonical duality theory’s role in bridging the gap between non-convex analysis/mechanics and global optimization. With 18 total chapters written by experts in their fields, this volume provides a nonconventional theory for unified understanding of the fundamental difficulties in large deformation mechanics, bifurcation/chaos in nonlinear science, and the NP-hard problems in global optimization. Additionally, readers will find a unified methodology and powerful algorithms for solving challenging problems in complex systems with real-world applications in non-convex analysis, non-monotone variational inequalities, integer programming, topology optimization, post-buckling of large deformed structures, etc. Researchers and graduate students will find explanation and potential applications in multidisciplinary fields.

This book’s title, Nonsmooth Mechanics and Analysis, refers to a major domain of mechanics, particularly those initiated by the works of Jean Jacques Moreau. Nonsmooth mechanics concerns mechanical situations with possible nondifferentiable relationships, eventually discontinuous, as unilateral contact, dry friction, collisions, plasticity, damage, and phase transition. The basis of the approach consists in dealing with such problems without resorting to any regularization process. Indeed, the nonsmoothness is due to simplified mechanical modeling; a more sophisticated model would require too large a number of variables, and sometimes the mechanical information is not available via experimental investigations. Therefore, the mathematical formulation becomes nonsmooth; regularizing would only be a trick of arithmetic without any physical justification. Nonsmooth analysis was developed, especially in Montpellier, to provide specific theoretical and numerical tools to deal with nonsmoothness. It is important not only in mechanics but also in physics, robotics, and economics. Audience This book is intended for researchers in mathematics and mechanics.

The concept of "reformulation" has long been playing an important role in mathematical programming. A classical example is the penalization technique in constrained optimization that transforms the constraints into the objective function via a penalty function thereby reformulating a constrained problem as an equivalent or approximately equivalent unconstrained problem. More recent trends consist of the reformulation of various mathematical programming prob lems, including variational inequalities and complementarity problems, into equivalent systems of possibly nonsmooth, piecewise smooth or semismooth nonlinear equations, or equivalent unconstrained optimization problems that are usually differentiable, but in general not twice differentiable. Because of the recent advent of various tools in nonsmooth analysis, the reformulation approach has become increasingly profound and diversified. In view of growing interests in this active field, we planned to organize a cluster of sessions entitled "Reformulation - Nonsmooth, Piecewise Smooth, Semismooth and Smoothing Methods" in the 16th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ismp97) held at Lausanne EPFL, Switzerland on August 24-29, 1997. Responding to our invitation, thirty-eight people agreed to give a talk within the cluster, which enabled us to organize thirteen sessions in total. We think that it was one of the largest and most exciting clusters in the symposium. Thanks to the earnest support by the speakers and the chairpersons, the sessions attracted much attention of the participants and were filled with great enthusiasm of the audience.

This monograph presents an original method to unify the mathematical theories of well-posed problems and contact mechanics. The author uses a new concept called the Tykhonov triple to develop a well-posedness theory in which every convergence result can be interpreted as a well-posedness result. This will be useful for studying a wide class of nonlinear problems, including fixed-point problems, inequality problems, and optimal control problems. Another unique feature of the manuscript is the unitary treatment of mathematical models of contact, for which new variational formulations and convergence results are presented. Well-Posed Nonlinear Problems will be a valuable resource for PhD students and researchers studying contact problems. It will also be accessible to interested researchers in related fields, such as physics, mechanics, engineering, and operations research.