This volume contains the proceedings of two related workshops held at The Fields Institute in February and March 1993. The workshops were an integral part of the thematic year in Dynamical Systems and Bifurcation Theory held during the 1992-1993 academic year. This volume covers the full spectrum of research involved in combining symmetry methods with dynamical systems and bifurcation theory, from the development of the mathematical theory in order to understand the underlying mechanisms to the application of this new mathematical theory, to partial differential equation models of realistic ph.

This IMA Volume in Mathematics and its Applications PATTERN FORMATION IN CONTINUOUS AND COUPLED SYSTEMS is based on the proceedings of a workshop with the same title, but goes be yond the proceedings by presenting a series of mini-review articles that sur vey, and provide an introduction to, interesting problems in the field. The workshop was an integral part of the 1997-98 IMA program on "EMERG ING APPLICATIONS OF DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS." I would like to thank Martin Golubitsky, University of Houston (Math ematics) Dan Luss, University of Houston (Chemical Engineering), and Steven H. Strogatz, Cornell University (Theoretical and Applied Mechan ics) for their excellent work as organizers of the meeting and for editing the proceedings. I also take this opportunity to thank the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Army Research Office (ARO), whose financial support made the workshop possible. Willard Miller, Jr., Professor and Director v PREFACE Pattern formation has been studied intensively for most of this cen tury by both experimentalists and theoreticians, and there have been many workshops and conferences devoted to the subject. In the IMA workshop on Pattern Formation in Continuous and Coupled Systems held May 11-15, 1998 we attempted to focus on new directions in the patterns literature.

Articles review the diverse recent progress in the theory and development of lattice-gas and lattice Boltzmann methods and their applications. It features up-to-date articles, takes an interdisciplinary approach including mathematics, physical chemistry, and geophysics.

Most physical systems lose or gain stability through bifurcation behavior. This book explains a series of experimentally found bifurcation phenomena by means of the methods of static bifurcation theory.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Workshop on Monte Carlo Methods held at The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto, 1998). The workshop brought together researchers in physics, statistics, and probability. The papers in this volume - of the invited speakers and contributors to the poster session - represent the interdisciplinary emphasis of the conference. Monte Carlo methods have been used intensively in many branches of scientific inquiry. Markov chain methods have been at the forefront of much of this work, serving as the basis of many numerical studies in statistical physics and related areas since the Metropolis algorithm was introduced in 1953. Statisticians and theoretical computer scientists have used these methods in recent years, working on different fundamental research questions, yet using similar Monte Carlo methodology. This volume focuses on Monte Carlo methods that appear to have wide applicability and emphasizes new methods, practical applications and theoretical analysis. It will be of interest to researchers and graduate students who study and/or use Monte Carlo methods in areas of probability, statistics, theoretical physics, or computer science.

This volume presents refereed papers presented at the workshop Semidefinite Programming and Interior-Point Approaches for Combinatorial Problems: held at The Fields Institute in May 1996. Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a generalization of linear programming (LP) in that the non-negativity constraints on the variables is replaced by a positive semidefinite constraint on matrix variables. Many of the elegant theoretical properties and powerful solution techniques follow through from LP to SDP. In particular, the primal-dual interior-point methods, which are currently so successful for LP, can be used to efficiently solve SDP problems. In addition to the theoretical and algorithmic questions, SDP has found many important applications in combinatorial optimization, control theory and other areas of mathematical programming. The papers in this volume cover a wide spectrum of recent developments in SDP. The volume would be suitable as a textbook for advanced courses in optimization. It is intended for graduate students and researchers in mathematics, computer science, engineering and operations.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Stavros Busenberg of Harvey Mudd College, who contributed so greatly to this field during 25 years prior to his untimely death. It contains about 60 invited papers by leading researchers in the areas of dynamical systems, mathematical studies in ecology, epidemics, and physiology, and industrial mathematics. Anyone interested in these areas will find much of value in these contributions.

The framework of ‘symmetry’ provides an important route between the abstract theory and experimental observations. The book applies symmetry methods to dynamical systems, focusing on bifurcation and chaos theory. Its exposition is organized around a wide variety of relevant applications. From the reviews: "[The] rich collection of examples makes the book...extremely useful for motivation and for spreading the ideas to a large Community."--MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS

This book presents the lecture notes and articles from the workshop on hydrodynamic limits held at The Fields Institute (Toronto). The first part of the book contains the notes from the mini-course given by Professor S. R. S. Varadhan. The second part contains research articles reviewing the diverse progress in the study of hydrodynamic limits and related areas. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the theory and its techniques, including entropy and relative entropy methods, large deviation estimates, and techniques in nongradient systems. This book, especially the lectures of Part I, could be used as a text for an advanced graduate course in hydrodynamic limits and interacting particle systems.

This volume is based on lectures given at the workshop on pseudo-differential operators held at the Fields Institute from December 11, 2006 to December 15, 2006. The two main themes of the workshop and hence this volume are partial differential equations and time-frequency analysis. The contents of this volume consist of five mini-courses for graduate students and post-docs, and fifteen papers on related topics. Of particular interest in this volume are the mathematical underpinnings, applications and ramifications of the relatively new Stockwell transform, which is a hybrid of the Gabor transform and the wavelet transform. The twenty papers in this volume reflect modern trends in the development of pseudo-differential operators.