The history of continued fractions is certainly one of the longest among those of mathematical concepts, since it begins with Euclid's algorithm for the great est common divisor at least three centuries B.C. As it is often the case and like Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's "Ie bourgeois gentilhomme" (who was speak ing in prose though he did not know he was doing so), continued fractions were used for many centuries before their real discovery. The history of continued fractions and Pade approximants is also quite im portant, since they played a leading role in the development of some branches of mathematics. For example, they were the basis for the proof of the tran scendence of 11' in 1882, an open problem for more than two thousand years, and also for our modern spectral theory of operators. Actually they still are of great interest in many fields of pure and applied mathematics and in numerical analysis, where they provide computer approximations to special functions and are connected to some convergence acceleration methods. Con tinued fractions are also used in number theory, computer science, automata, electronics, etc ...

Approximation methods are vital in many challenging applications of computational science and engineering. This is a collection of papers from world experts in a broad variety of relevant applications, including pattern recognition, machine learning, multiscale modelling of fluid flow, metrology, geometric modelling, tomography, signal and image processing. It documents recent theoretical developments which have lead to new trends in approximation, it gives important computational aspects and multidisciplinary applications, thus making it a perfect fit for graduate students and researchers in science and engineering who wish to understand and develop numerical algorithms for the solution of their specific problems. An important feature of the book is that it brings together modern methods from statistics, mathematical modelling and numerical simulation for the solution of relevant problems, with a wide range of inherent scales. Contributions of industrial mathematicians, including representatives from Microsoft and Schlumberger, foster the transfer of the latest approximation methods to real-world applications.

This Festschrift, published on the occasion of the sixtieth birthday of Yutaka - mamoto (‘YY’ as he is occasionally casually referred to), contains a collection of articles by friends, colleagues, and former Ph.D. students of YY. They are a tribute to his friendship and his scienti?c vision and oeuvre, which has been a source of inspiration to the authors. Yutaka Yamamoto was born in Kyoto, Japan, on March 29, 1950. He studied applied mathematics and general engineering science at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Physics of Kyoto University, obtaining the B.S. and M.Sc. degrees in 1972 and 1974. His M.Sc. work was done under the supervision of Professor Yoshikazu Sawaragi. In 1974, he went to the Center for Mathematical System T- ory of the University of Florida in Gainesville. He obtained the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees, both in Mathematics, in 1976 and 1978, under the direction of Professor Rudolf Kalman.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed papers of the 15th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, CIAA 2010, held in Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, in August 2010. The 26 revised full papers together with 6 short papers were carefully selected from 52 submissions. The papers cover various topics such as applications of automata in computer-aided verification; natural language processing; pattern matching, data storage and retrieval; bioinformatics; algebra; graph theory; and foundational work on automata theory.

Asymptotic Methods for Engineers is based on the authors’ many years of practical experience in the application of asymptotic methods to solve engineering problems. This book is devoted to modern asymptotic methods (AM), which is widely used in engineering, applied sciences, physics, and applied mathematics. Avoiding complex formal calculations and justifications, the book’s main goal is to describe the main ideas and algorithms. Moreover, not only is there a presentation of the main AM, but there is also a focus on demonstrating their unity and inseparable connection with the methods of summation and asymptotic interpolation. The book will be useful for students and researchers from applied mathematics and physics and of interest to doctoral and graduate students, university and industry professors from various branches of engineering (mechanical, civil, electro-mechanical, etc.).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th IAPR TC-18 International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery, DGCI 2008, held in Lyon, France, in April 2008. The 23 revised full papers and 22 revised poster papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 76 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on models for discrete geometry, discrete and combinatorial topology, geometric transforms, discrete shape representation, recognition and analysis, discrete tomography, morphological analysis, discrete modelling and visualization, as well as discrete and combinatorial tools for image segmentation and analysis.

The major emphasis of the Dagstuhl Seminar on “Numerical Validation in C- rent Hardware Architectures” lay on numerical validation in current hardware architecturesand softwareenvironments. The generalidea wasto bring together experts who are concerned with computer arithmetic in systems with actual processor architectures and scientists who develop, use, and need techniques from veri?ed computation in their applications. Topics of the seminar therefore included: – The ongoing revision of the IEEE 754/854 standard for ?oating-point ari- metic – Feasible ways to implement multiple precision (multiword) arithmetic and to compute the actual precision at run-time according to the needs of input data – The achievement of a similar behavior of ?xed-point, ?oating-point and - terval arithmetic across language compliant implementations – The design of robust and e?cient numerical programsportable from diverse computers to those that adhere to the IEEE standard – The development and propagation of validated special-purpose software in di?erent application areas – Error analysis in several contexts – Certi?cation of numerical programs, veri?cation and validation assessment Computer arithmetic plays an important role at the hardware and software level, when microprocessors, embedded systems, or grids are designed. The re- ability of numerical softwarestrongly depends on the compliance with the cor- sponding ?oating-point norms. Standard CISC processors follow the 1985 IEEE norm 754, which is currently under revision, but the new highly performing CELL processor is not fully IEEE compliant.

There is a nineteen-year recurrence in the apparent position of the sun and moon against the background of the stars, a pattern observed long ago by the Babylonians. In the course of those nineteen years the Earth experiences 235 lunar cycles. Suppose we calculate the ratio of Earth's period about the sun to the moon's period about Earth. That ratio has 235/19 as one of its early continued fraction convergents, which explains the apparent periodicity. Exploring Continued Fractions explains this and other recurrent phenomena—astronomical transits and conjunctions, lifecycles of cicadas, eclipses—by way of continued fraction expansions. The deeper purpose is to find patterns, solve puzzles, and discover some appealing number theory. The reader will explore several algorithms for computing continued fractions, including some new to the literature. He or she will also explore the surprisingly large portion of number theory connected to continued fractions: Pythagorean triples, Diophantine equations, the Stern-Brocot tree, and a number of combinatorial sequences. The book features a pleasantly discursive style with excursions into music (The Well-Tempered Clavier), history (the Ishango bone and Plimpton 322), classics (the shape of More's Utopia) and whimsy (dropping a black hole on Earth's surface). Andy Simoson has won both the Chauvenet Prize and Pólya Award for expository writing from the MAA and his Voltaire's Riddle was a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title. This book is an enjoyable ramble through some beautiful mathematics. For most of the journey the only necessary prerequisites are a minimal familiarity with mathematical reasoning and a sense of fun.

Composites have been studied for more than 150 years, and interest in their properties has been growing. This classic volume provides the foundations for understanding a broad range of composite properties, including electrical, magnetic, electromagnetic, elastic and viscoelastic, piezoelectric, thermal, fluid flow through porous materials, thermoelectric, pyroelectric, magnetoelectric, and conduction in the presence of a magnetic field (Hall effect). Exact solutions of the PDEs in model geometries provide one avenue of understanding composites; other avenues include microstructure-independent exact relations satisfied by effective moduli, for which the general theory is reviewed; approximation formulae for effective moduli; and series expansions for the fields and effective moduli that are the basis of numerical methods for computing these fields and moduli. The range of properties that composites can exhibit can be explored either through the model geometries or through microstructure-independent bounds on the properties. These bounds are obtained through variational principles, analytic methods, and Hilbert space approaches. Most interesting is when the properties of the composite are unlike those of the constituent materials, and there has been an explosion of interest in such composites, now known as metamaterials. The Theory of Composites surveys these aspects, among others, and complements the new body of literature that has emerged since the book was written. It remains relevant today by providing historical background, a compendium of numerous results, and through elucidating many of the tools still used today in the analysis of composite properties. This book is intended for applied mathematicians, physicists, and electrical and mechanical engineers. It will also be of interest to graduate students.

These are the proceedings of the international conference on "Nonlinear numerical methods and Rational approximation II" organised by Annie Cuyt at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), 05-11 September 1993. It was held for the third time in Antwerp at the conference center of UIA, after successful meetings in 1979 and 1987 and an almost yearly tradition since the early 70's. The following figures illustrate the growing number of participants and their geographical dissemination. In 1993 the Belgian scientific committee consisted of A. Bultheel (Leuven), A. Cuyt (Antwerp), J. Meinguet (Louvain-Ia-Neuve) and J.-P. Thiran (Namur). The conference focused on the use of rational functions in different fields of Numer ical Analysis. The invited speakers discussed "Orthogonal polynomials" (D. S. Lu binsky), "Rational interpolation" (M. Gutknecht), "Rational approximation" (E. B. Saff) , "Pade approximation" (A. Gonchar) and "Continued fractions" (W. B. Jones). In contributed talks multivariate and multidimensional problems, applications and implementations of each main topic were considered. To each of the five main topics a separate conference day was devoted and a separate proceedings chapter compiled accordingly. In this way the proceedings reflect the organisation of the talks at the conference. Nonlinear numerical methods and rational approximation may be a nar row field for the outside world, but it provides a vast playground for the chosen ones. It can fascinate specialists from Moscow to South-Africa, from Boulder in Colorado and from sunny Florida to Zurich in Switzerland.