Annotation. Proceedings from the First International Conference on Inverse Problems, Recent Theoretical Development and Numerical Approaches, held at the City University of Hong Kong from January 9-12, 2002.

The book concerns theoretical and numerical aspects of systems of conservation laws, which can be considered as a mathematical model for the flows of inviscid compressible fluids. Five leading specialists in this area give an overview of the recent results, which include: kinetic methods, non-classical shock waves, viscosity and relaxation methods, a-posteriori error estimates, numerical schemes of higher order on unstructured grids in 3-D, preconditioning and symmetrization of the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. This book will prove to be very useful for scientists working in mathematics, computational fluid mechanics, aerodynamics and astrophysics, as well as for graduate students, who want to learn about new developments in this area.

Hyperbolic partial differential equations describe phenomena of material or wave transport in physics, biology and engineering, especially in the field of fluid mechanics. The mathematical theory of hyperbolic equations has recently made considerable progress. Accurate and efficient numerical schemes for computation have been and are being further developed. This two-volume set of conference proceedings contains about 100 refereed and carefully selected papers. The books are intended for researchers and graduate students in mathematics, science and engineering interested in the most recent results in theory and practice of hyperbolic problems. Applications touched in these proceedings concern one-phase and multiphase fluid flow, phase transitions, shallow water dynamics, elasticity, extended thermodynamics, electromagnetism, classical and relativistic magnetohydrodynamics, cosmology. Contributions to the abstract theory of hyperbolic systems deal with viscous and relaxation approximations, front tracking and wellposedness, stability of shock profiles and multi-shock patterns, traveling fronts for transport equations. Numerically oriented articles study finite difference, finite volume, and finite element schemes, adaptive, multiresolution, and artificial dissipation methods.

In accordance with the developments in computation, theoretical studies on numerical schemes are now fruitful and highly needed. In 1991 an article on the finite element method applied to evolutionary problems was published. Following the method, basically this book studies various schemes from operator theoretical points of view. Many parts are devoted to the finite element method, but other schemes and problems (charge simulation method, domain decomposition method, nonlinear problems, and so forth) are also discussed, motivated by the observation that practically useful schemes have fine mathematical structures and the converses are also true.

Modified gravity theories have been a main focus of theoretical cosmology research in the past decade or so, and have been quickly developing into a mature research field that attracts attention, interest and effort from both theoretical and observational cosmologists. To be prepared for fully exploiting the future observational data, and to provide a guidance for people who are new to this field, it is useful to have a comprehensive review to summarise the current state of knowledge and to foresee the future developments.This book presents expert reviews on different topics in the field, which are then coordinated and organised in a self-consistent and self-contained manner. It is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in the frontier research of gravity theories.

This edited volume highlights the scientific contributions of Volker Mehrmann, a leading expert in the area of numerical (linear) algebra, matrix theory, differential-algebraic equations and control theory. These mathematical research areas are strongly related and often occur in the same real-world applications. The main areas where such applications emerge are computational engineering and sciences, but increasingly also social sciences and economics. This book also reflects some of Volker Mehrmann's major career stages. Starting out working in the areas of numerical linear algebra (his first full professorship at TU Chemnitz was in "Numerical Algebra," hence the title of the book) and matrix theory, Volker Mehrmann has made significant contributions to these areas ever since. The highlights of these are discussed in Parts I and II of the present book. Often the development of new algorithms in numerical linear algebra is motivated by problems in system and control theory. These and his later major work on differential-algebraic equations, to which he together with Peter Kunkel made many groundbreaking contributions, are the topic of the chapters in Part III. Besides providing a scientific discussion of Volker Mehrmann's work and its impact on the development of several areas of applied mathematics, the individual chapters stand on their own as reference works for selected topics in the fields of numerical (linear) algebra, matrix theory, differential-algebraic equations and control theory.

The intellectual center of this proceedings volume is the subject of conservation laws. Conservation laws are the most basic model of many continuum processes, and for this reason they govern the motion of fluids, solids, and plasma. They are basic to the understanding of more complex modeling issues, such as multiphase flow, chemically reacting flow, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Equations of this type also arise in novel and unexpected areas, such as the pattern recognition and image processing problem of edge enhancement and detection. The articles in this volume address the entire range of the study of conservation laws, including the fundamental mathematical theory, familiar and novel applications, and the numerical problem of finding effective computational algorithms for the solution of these problems.

The International Conference on "Hyperbolic Problems: Theory, Numerics and Applications'' was held in CalTech on March 25-30, 2002. The conference was the ninth meeting in the bi-annual international series which became one of the highest quality and most successful conference series in Applied mathematics. This volume contains more than 90 contributions presented in this conference, including plenary presentations by A. Bressan, P. Degond, R. LeVeque, T.-P. Liu, B. Perthame, C.-W. Shu, B. Sjögreen and S. Ukai. Reflecting the objective of series, the contributions in this volume keep the traditional blend of theory, numerics and applications. The Hyp2002 meeting placed a particular emphasize on fundamental theory and numerical analysis, on multi-scale analysis, modeling and simulations, and on geophysical applications and free boundary problems arising from materials science and multi-component fluid dynamics. The volume should appeal to researchers, students and practitioners with general interest in time-dependent problems governed by hyperbolic equations.

[Infotext]((Kurztext))These are the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems, held in Zürich in February 1998. The speakers and contributors have been rigorously selected and present the state of the art in this field. The articles, both theoretical and numerical, encompass a wide range of applications, such as nonlinear waves in solids, various computational fluid dynamics from small-scale combustion to relativistic astrophysical problems, multiphase phenomena and geometrical optics. ((Volltext))These proceedings contain, in two volumes, approximately one hundred papers presented at the conference on hyperbolic problems, which has focused to a large extent on the laws of nonlinear hyperbolic conservation. Two-fifths of the papers are devoted to mathematical aspects such as global existence, uniqueness, asymptotic behavior such as large time stability, stability and instabilities of waves and structures, various limits of the solution, the Riemann problem and so on. Roughly the same number of articles are devoted to numerical analysis, for example stability and convergence of numerical schemes, as well as schemes with special desired properties such as shock capturing, interface fitting and high-order approximations to multidimensional systems. The results in these contributions, both theoretical and numerical, encompass a wide range of applications such as nonlinear waves in solids, various computational fluid dynamics from small-scale combustion to relativistic astrophysical problems, multiphase phenomena and geometrical optics.