Numerical simulation is rapidly becoming an important part of the VLSI design process, allowing the engineer to test, evaluate, and optimize various aspects of chip design without resorting to the costly and time-consuming process of fabricating prototypes. This procedure not only accelerates the design process, but also improves the end product, since it is economically feasible to numerically simulate many more options than might otherwise be considered. With the enhanced computing power of today's computers, more sophisticated models are now being developed. This volume contains the proceedings of the AMS-SIAM Summer Seminar on Computational Aspects of VLSI Design, held at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications at the University of Minnesota, in the spring of 1987. The seminar featured presentations by some of the top experts working in this area. Their contributions to this volume form an excellent overview of the mathematical and computational problems arising in this area.

The development of new computational techniques and better computing power has made it possible to attack some classical problems of algebraic geometry. The main goal of this book is to highlight such computational techniques related to algebraic curves. The area of research in algebraic curves is receiving more interest not only from the mathematics community, but also from engineers and computer scientists, because of the importance of algebraic curves in applications including cryptography, coding theory, error-correcting codes, digital imaging, computer vision, and many more.This book covers a wide variety of topics in the area, including elliptic curve cryptography, hyperelliptic curves, representations on some Riemann-Roch spaces of modular curves, computation of Hurwitz spectra, generating systems of finite groups, Galois groups of polynomials, among other topics.

The NATO Advanced study Institute (ASI) on "Computational Aspects of Complex Analysis" was held at Braunlage/Harz (Germany) from July 26 to August 6, 1982. These proceedings contain the invited lectures presented at this institute, the aim of which was to bring together scientists from pure and applied mathematics as well as computer scientists. The main topics were problems dealing with approximation and interpolation by polynomial and rational functions (in particular Pade approximation), numerical methods for the solution of algebraic equations and differential equations, the large field of conformal mapping, aspects of computer imple mentation of complex arithmetic and calculations based on complex variable techniques. The sessions on short communications not only provided a platform for the presentation of contributions by the participants of the ASI but also the opportunity to discuss the material more thoroughly, to bring up open problems and to point out the inter relationship of the above mentioned topics. Quite naturally the short communications grouped around the topics of the main lectures. The stimulating atmosphere caused many discussions to continue privately for hours. Even out of the social program there emanated two short communications by L. Wuytack and L. Trefethen, which are included at the end of these proceedings. We gratefully appreciate the support of the International Advisory Committee that was formed by L. Collatz, Germany, C. Brezinski, France, G. Golub, U.S.A., P. Henrici, Switzerland, J. van Hulzen, the Netherlands, O. Skovgaard, Denmark, I. Sneddon, United Kingdom, and J. Todd, U.S.A.

This volume contains papers which were contributed for presentation at the international conference "Fundamentals of Computation Theory - FCT '91" heldat Gosen, near Berlin, September 9-13, 1991. This was the eighth in the series of FCT conferences organized every odd year. The programme of theconference, including invited lectures and selected contributions, falls into the following categories: - Semantics and logical concepts in the theory of computing, formal specification, - Automata and formal languages, Computational geometry, - Algorithmic aspects of algebra and algebraic geometry, cryptography, - Complexity (sequential, parallel, distributed computing, structure, lower bounds, complexity of analytical problems, general concepts), - Algorithms (efficient, probabilistic, parallel, sequential, distributed), - Counting and combinatorics in connection with mathematical computer science. The proceedings of previous FCT meetings are available as Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vols. 380, 278, 199, 158, 117, 56).

This book contains original reviews by well-known workers in the field of mathematical linguistics and formal language theory, written in honour of Professor Solomon Marcus on the occasion of his 70th birthday.Some of the papers deal with contextual grammars, a class of generative devices introduced by Marcus, motivated by descriptive linguistics. Others are devoted to grammar systems, a very modern branch of formal language theory. Automata theory and the algebraic approach to computer science are other well-represented areas. While the contributions are mathematically oriented, practical issues such as cryptography, grammatical inference and natural language processing are also discussed.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Second Annual International Conference on Computing and Combinatorics, COCOON '96, held in June 1996 in Hong Kong. The 44 papers presented in the book in revised version were carefully selected from a total of 82 submissions. They describe state-of-the-art research results from various areas of theoretical computer science, combinatorics related to computing, and experimental analysis of algorithms; computational graph theory, computational geometry, and networking issues are particularly well-presented.

The foundations of parallel computation, especially the efficiency of computation, are the concern of this book. Distinguished international researchers have contributed fifteen chapters which together form a coherent stream taking the reader who has little prior knowledge of the field to a position of being familiar with leading edge issues. The book may also function as a source of teaching material and reference for researchers. The first part is devoted to the Parallel Random Access Machine (P-RAM) model of parallel computation. The initial chapters justify and define the model, which is then used for the development of algorithm design in a variety of application areas such as deterministic algorithms, randomisation and algorithm resilience. The second part deals with distributed memory models of computation. The question of efficiently implementing P-RAM algorithms within these models is addressed as are the immensely interesting prospects for general purpose parallel computation.

The communication complexity of two-party protocols is an only 15 years old complexity measure, but it is already considered to be one of the fundamen tal complexity measures of recent complexity theory. Similarly to Kolmogorov complexity in the theory of sequential computations, communication complex ity is used as a method for the study of the complexity of concrete computing problems in parallel information processing. Especially, it is applied to prove lower bounds that say what computer resources (time, hardware, memory size) are necessary to compute the given task. Besides the estimation of the compu tational difficulty of computing problems the proved lower bounds are useful for proving the optimality of algorithms that are already designed. In some cases the knowledge about the communication complexity of a given problem may be even helpful in searching for efficient algorithms to this problem. The study of communication complexity becomes a well-defined indepen dent area of complexity theory. In addition to a strong relation to several funda mental complexity measures (and so to several fundamental problems of com plexity theory) communication complexity has contributed to the study and to the understanding of the nature of determinism, nondeterminism, and random ness in algorithmics. There already exists a non-trivial mathematical machinery to handle the communication complexity of concrete computing problems, which gives a hope that the approach based on communication complexity will be in strumental in the study of several central open problems of recent complexity theory.