This volume contains papers arising out of the program of the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP) of the University of California at Santa Bar bara, August-December 1991, on the subject "Topological Fluid Dynamics". The first group of papers cover the lectures on Knot Theory, Relaxation un der Topological Constraints, Kinematics of Stretching, and Fast Dynamo Theory presented at the initial Pedagogical Workshop of the program. The remaining papers were presented at the subsequent NATO Advanced Re search Workshop or were written during the course of the program. We wish to acknowledge the support of the NATO Science Committee in making this workshop possible. The scope of "Topological Fluid Dynamics" was defined by an earlier Symposium of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechan ics (IUTAM) held in Cambridge, England in August, 1989, the Proceedings of which were published (Eds. H.K. Moffatt and A. Tsinober) by Cambridge University Press in 1990. The proposal to hold an ITP program on this sub ject emerged from that Symposium, and we are grateful to John Greene and Charlie Kennel at whose encouragement the original proposal was formu lated. Topological fluid dynamics covers a range of problems, particularly those involving vortex tubes and/or magnetic flux tubes in nearly ideal fluids, for which topological structures can be identified and to some extent quantified.

Modern experiments and numerical simulations show that the long-known coherent structures in turbulence take the form of elongated vortex tubes and vortex sheets. The evolution of vortex tubes may result in spiral structures which can be associated with the spectral power laws of turbulence. The mutual stretching of skewed vortex tubes, when they are close to each other, causes rapid growth of vorticity. Whether this process may or may not lead to a finite-time singularity is one of the famous open problems of fluid dynamics. This book contains the proceedings of the NATO ARW and IUTAM Symposium held in Zakopane, Poland, 2-7 September 2001. The papers presented, carefully reviewed by the International Scientific Committee, cover various aspects of the dynamics of vortex tubes and sheets and of their analogues in magnetohydrodynamics and in quantum turbulence. The book should be a useful reference for all researchers and students of modern fluid dynamics.

This text is the result of an AMS Short Course on Knots and Physics that was held in San Francisco in January 1994. The authors use ideas and methods of mathematical physics to extract topological information about knots and manifolds. The book features a basic introduction to knot polynomials in relation to statistical link invariants as well as concise introductions to topological quantum field theories and to the role of knot theory in quantum gravity.

The book presents an advanced but accessible overview of some of the most important sub-branches of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD): stability theory, magnetic topology, relaxation theory and magnetic reconnection. Although each of these subjects is often treated separately, in practical MHD applications they are normally inseparable. MHD is a highly active field of research.The book is written for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working on MHD-related research in plasma physics and fluid dynamics.

The first monograph to treat topological, group-theoretic, and geometric problems of ideal hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics from a unified point of view. It describes the necessary preliminary notions both in hydrodynamics and pure mathematics with numerous examples and figures. The book is accessible to graduates as well as pure and applied mathematicians working in hydrodynamics, Lie groups, dynamical systems, and differential geometry.

The book contains invited lectures and selected contributions presented at the Enzo Levi and XVII Annual Meeting of the Fluid Dynamic Division of the Mexican Physical Society in 2011. It is aimed to fourth year undergraduate and graduate students, and scientists in the field of physics, engineering and chemistry that have interest in Fluid Dynamics from the experimental and theoretical point of view. The invited lectures are introductory and avoid the use of complicate mathematics. The other selected contributions are also adequate to fourth year undergraduate and graduate students. The Fluid Dynamics applications include multiphase flow, convection, diffusion, heat transfer, rheology, granular material, viscous flow, porous media flow, geophysics and astrophysics. The material contained in the book includes recent advances in experimental and theoretical fluid dynamics and is adequate for both teaching and research.

There have been exciting developments in the area of knot theory in recent years. They include Thurston's work on geometric structures on 3-manifolds (e.g. knot complements), Gordon–Luecke work on surgeries on knots, Jones' work on invariants of links in S3, and advances in the theory of invariants of 3-manifolds based on Jones- and Vassiliev-type invariants of links. Jones ideas and Thurston's idea are connected by the following path: hyperbolic structures, PSL(2, C) representations, character varieties, quantization of the coordinate ring of the variety to skein modules (i.e. Kauffman, bracket skein module), and finally quantum invariants of 3-manifolds. This proceedings volume covers all those exciting topics.

This workshop gathered experts in plasma physics, nonlinear phenomena and mathematics. It aimed at enabling theoreticians and experimentalists in plasma turbulence to relate electromagnetic fluctuations to transport processes. It may lead to the development of new diagnostics and new methods for signal processing.

Providing an introduction to isogeometric methods with a focus on their mathematical foundations, this book is composed of four chapters, each devoted to a topic of special interests for isogeometric methods and their theoretical understanding. It contains a tutorial on splines and generalizations that are used in CAD parametrizations, and gives an overview of geometric modeling techniques that can be used within the isogeometric approach, with a focus on non-tensor product splines. Finally, it presents the mathematical properties of isogeometric spaces and spline spaces for vector field approximations, and treats in detail an application of fundamental importance: the isogeometric simulation of a viscous incompressible flow. The contributions were written by Carla Manni and Hendrik Speelers, Vibeke Skytt and Tor Dokken, Lourenco Beirao da Veiga, Annalisa Buffa, Giancarlo Sangalli and Rafael Vazquez, and finally by John Evans and Thomas J.R. Hughes.