This volume contains the invited papers presented at the British Combinatorial Conference, held at the University of Surrey in July 1991.

This volume contains the invited papers presented at the British Combinatorial Conference, held at the University of Surrey in July 1991. As in previous years, the speakers were mathematicians of the highest quality who spanned the subject area, and their papers will provide excellent reading for all those interested in combinatorics.

The fifteenth British Combinatorial Conference took place in July 1995 at the University of Stirling. This volume consists of the papers presented by the invited lecturers at the meeting, and provides an up-to-date survey of current research activity in several areas of combinatorics and its applications. These include distance-regular graphs, combinatorial designs, coding theory, spectra of graphs, and randomness and computation. The articles give an overview of combinatorics that will be extremely useful to both mathematicians and computer scientists.

Second order linear parabolic and elliptic equations arise frequently in mathematics and other disciplines. For example parabolic equations are to be found in statistical mechanics and solid state theory, their infinite dimensional counterparts are important in fluid mechanics, mathematical finance and population biology, whereas nonlinear parabolic equations arise in control theory. Here the authors present a state of the art treatment of the subject from a new perspective. The main tools used are probability measures in Hilbert and Banach spaces and stochastic evolution equations. There is then a discussion of how the results in the book can be applied to control theory. This area is developing very rapidly and there are numerous notes and references that point the reader to more specialised results not covered in the book. Coverage of some essential background material will help make the book self-contained and increase its appeal to those entering the subject.

This is the first extensive treatment of the theory of corings and their comodules. In the first part, the module-theoretic aspects of coalgebras over commutative rings are described. Corings are then defined as coalgebras over non-commutative rings. Topics covered include module-theoretic aspects of corings, such as the relation of comodules to special subcategories of the category of modules (sigma-type categories), connections between corings and extensions of rings, properties of new examples of corings associated to entwining structures, generalisations of bialgebras such as bialgebroids and weak bialgebras, and the appearance of corings in non-commutative geometry.

Ever since the seminal work of Goppa on algebraic-geometry codes, rational points on algebraic curves over finite fields have been an important research topic for algebraic geometers and coding theorists. The focus in this application of algebraic geometry to coding theory is on algebraic curves over finite fields with many rational points (relative to the genus). Recently, the authors discovered another important application of such curves, namely to the construction of low-discrepancy sequences. These sequences are needed for numerical methods in areas as diverse as computational physics and mathematical finance. This has given additional impetus to the theory of, and the search for, algebraic curves over finite fields with many rational points. This book aims to sum up the theoretical work on algebraic curves over finite fields with many rational points and to discuss the applications of such curves to algebraic coding theory and the construction of low-discrepancy sequences.

This book contains a collection of survey papers by leading researchers in ergodic theory, low-dimensional and topological dynamics and it comprises nine chapters on a range of important topics. These include: the role and usefulness of ultrafilters in ergodic theory, topological dynamics and Ramsey theory; topological aspects of kneading theory together with an analogous 2-dimensional theory called pruning; the dynamics of Markov odometers, Bratteli-Vershik diagrams and orbit equivalence of non-singular automorphisms; geometric proofs of Mather's connecting and accelerating theorems; recent results in one dimensional smooth dynamics; periodic points of nonexpansive maps; arithmetic dynamics; the defect of factor maps; entropy theory for actions of countable amenable groups.

Dessins d'Enfants are combinatorial objects, namely drawings with vertices and edges on topological surfaces. Their interest lies in their relation with the set of algebraic curves defined over the closure of the rationals, and the corresponding action of the absolute Galois group on them. The study of this group via such realted combinatorial methods as its action on the Dessins and on certain fundamental groups of moduli spaces was initiated by Alexander Grothendieck in his unpublished Esquisse d'un Programme, and developed by many of the mathematicians who have contributed to this volume. The various articles here unite all of the basics of the subject as well as the most recent advances. Researchers in number theory, algebraic geometry or related areas of group theory will find much of interest in this book.

Selected papers from the Computer Algebra and Differential Equations meeting held in France in June 1992.

An introduction to the theory of operator spaces, emphasising applications to C*-algebras.