The international summer school on Calculus of Variations and Geometric Evolution Problems was held at Cetraro, Italy, 1996. The contributions to this volume reflect quite closely the lectures given at Cetraro which have provided an image of a fairly broad field in analysis where in recent years we have seen many important contributions. Among the topics treated in the courses were variational methods for Ginzburg-Landau equations, variational models for microstructure and phase transitions, a variational treatment of the Plateau problem for surfaces of prescribed mean curvature in Riemannian manifolds - both from the classical point of view and in the setting of geometric measure theory.

At the summer school in Pisa in September 1996, Luigi Ambrosio and Norman Dancer each gave a course on the geometric problem of evolution of a surface by mean curvature, and degree theory with applications to PDEs respectively. This self-contained presentation accessible to PhD students bridged the gap between standard courses and advanced research on these topics. The resulting book is divided accordingly into 2 parts, and neatly illustrates the 2-way interaction of problems and methods. Each of the courses is augmented and complemented by additional short chapters by other authors describing current research problems and results.

Based on talks given at the International Conference on Analysis and Geometry in honor of the 75th birthday of Yurii Reshetnyak (Novosibirsk, 2004), this title includes topics such as geometry of spaces with bounded curvature in the sense of Alexandrov, quasiconformal mappings and mappings with bounded distortion, and nonlinear potential theory."

The international summer school on Calculus of Variations and Geometric Evolution Problems was held at Cetraro, Italy, 1996. The contributions to this volume reflect quite closely the lectures given at Cetraro which have provided an image of a fairly broad field in analysis where in recent years we have seen many important contributions. Among the topics treated in the courses were variational methods for Ginzburg-Landau equations, variational models for microstructure and phase transitions, a variational treatment of the Plateau problem for surfaces of prescribed mean curvature in Riemannian manifolds - both from the classical point of view and in the setting of geometric measure theory.