In the last forty years, nonlinear analysis has been broadly and rapidly developed. Lectures presented in the International Conference on Variational Methods at the Chern Institute of Mathematics in Tianjin of May 2009 reflect this development from different angles. This volume contains articles based on lectures in the following areas of nonlinear analysis: critical point theory, Hamiltonian dynamics, partial differential equations and systems, KAM theory, bifurcation theory, symplectic geometry, geometrical analysis, and celestial mechanics. Combinations of topological, analytical (especially variational), geometrical, and algebraic methods in these researches play important roles. In this proceedings, introductory materials on new theories and surveys on traditional topics are also given. Further perspectives and open problems on hopeful research topics in related areas are described and proposed. Researchers, graduate and postgraduate students from a wide range of areas in mathematics and physics will find contents in this proceedings are helpful.

In the last forty years, nonlinear analysis has been broadly and rapidly developed. Lectures presented in the International Conference on Variational Methods at the Chern Institute of Mathematics in Tianjin of May 2009 reflect this development from different angles. This volume contains articles based on lectures in the following areas of nonlinear analysis: critical point theory, Hamiltonian dynamics, partial differential equations and systems, KAM theory, bifurcation theory, symplectic geometry, geometrical analysis, and celestial mechanics. Combinations of topological, analytical (especially variational), geometrical, and algebraic methods in these researches play important roles. In this proceedings, introductory materials on new theories and surveys on traditional topics are also given. Further perspectives and open problems on hopeful research topics in related areas are described and proposed. Researchers, graduate and postgraduate students from a wide range of areas in mathematics and physics will find contents in this proceedings are helpful.

This volume contains the Proceedings of the International Workshop Variational Methods For Discontinuous Structures, which was jointly organized by the Dipar timento di Matematica Francesco Brioschi of Milano Politecnico and the Interna tional School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste. The Conference took place at Villa Erba Antica (Cernobbio) on the Lago di Como on July 4- 6, 2001. In past years the calculus of variations faced mainly the study of continuous structures, say particularly problems with smooth solutions. One of the deepest and more delicate problems was the regularity of weak solutions. More recently, new sophisticated tools have been introduced in order to study discontinuities: in many variational problems solutions develop singularities, and sometimes the most interesting part of a solution is the singularity itself. The conference intended to focus on recent developments in this direction. Some of the talks were devoted to differential or variational modelling of image segmentation, occlusion and textures synthesizing in image analysis, varia tional description of micro-magnetic materials, dimension reduction and structured deformations in elasticity and plasticity, phase transitions, irrigation and drainage, evolution of crystalline shapes; in most cases theoretical and numerical analysis of these models were provided. viii Preface Other talks were dedicated to specific problems of the calculus of variations: variational theory of weak or lower-dimensional structures, optimal transport prob lems with free Dirichlet regions, higher order variational problems, symmetrization in the BV framework.

This volume contains the proceedings of the international workshop Variational Problems in Materials Science. Coverage includes the study of BV vector fields, path functionals over Wasserstein spaces, variational approaches to quasi-static evolution, free-discontinuity problems with applications to fracture and plasticity, systems with hysteresis or with interfacial energies, evolution of interfaces, multi-scale analysis in ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity, and much more.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Scale Space Methods and Variational Methods in Computer Vision, SSVM 2009, emanated from the joint edition of the 5th International Workshop on Variational, Geometric and Level Set Methods in Computer Vision, VLSM 2009 and the 7th International Conference on Scale Space and PDE Methods in Computer Vision, Scale-Space 2009, held in Voss, Norway in June 2009. The 71 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on segmentation and detection; image enhancement and reconstruction; motion analysis, optical flow, registration and tracking; surfaces and shapes; scale space and feature extraction.