Gunter Lumer was an outstanding mathematician whose works have great influence on the research community in mathematical analysis and evolution equations. He was at the origin of the breath-taking development the theory of semigroups saw after the pioneering book of Hille and Phillips from 1957. This volume contains invited contributions presenting the state of the art of these topics and reflecting the broad interests of Gunter Lumer.

These Proceedings comprise the bulk of the papers presented at the Inter national Conference on Semigroups of Opemtors: Theory and Contro~ held 14-18 December 1998, Newport Beach, California, U.S.A. The intent of the Conference was to highlight recent advances in the the ory of Semigroups of Operators which provides the abstract framework for the time-domain solutions of time-invariant boundary-value/initial-value problems of partial differential equations. There is of course a firewall between the ab stract theory and the applications and one of the Conference aims was to bring together both in the hope that it may be of value to both communities. In these days when all scientific activity is judged by its value on "dot com" it is not surprising that mathematical analysis that holds no promise of an immediate commercial product-line, or even a software tool-box, is not high in research priority. We are particularly pleased therefore that the National Science Foundation provided generous financial support without which this Conference would have been impossible to organize. Our special thanks to Dr. Kishan Baheti, Program Manager.

The international conference on which the book is based brought together many of the world's leading experts, with particular effort on the interaction between established scientists and emerging young promising researchers, as well as on the interaction of pure and applied mathematics. All material has been rigorously refereed. The contributions contain much material developed after the conference, continuing research and incorporating additional new results and improvements. In addition, some up-to-date surveys are included.

The seminar on Stochastic Analysis and Mathematical Physics started in 1984 at the Catholic University of Chile in Santiago and has been an on going research activity. Since 1995, the group has organized international workshops as a way of promoting a broader dialogue among experts in the areas of classical and quantum stochastic analysis, mathematical physics and physics. This volume, consisting primarily of contributions to the Third Inter national Workshop on Stochastic Analysis and Mathematical Physics (in Spanish ANESTOC), held in Santiago, Chile, in October 1998, focuses on an analysis of quantum dynamics and related problems in probability the ory. Various articles investigate quantum dynamical semigroups and new results on q-deformed oscillator algebras, while others examine the appli cation of classical stochastic processes in quantum modeling. As in previous workshops, the topic of quantum flows and semigroups occupied an important place. In her paper, R. Carbone uses a spectral type analysis to obtain exponential rates of convergence towards the equilibrium of a quantum dynamical semigroup in the £2 sense. The method is illus trated with a quantum extension of a classical birth and death process. Quantum extensions of classical Markov processes lead to subtle problems of domains. This is in particular illustrated by F. Fagnola, who presents a pathological example of a semigroup for which the largest * -subalgebra (of the von Neumann algebra of bounded linear operators of £2 (lR+, IC)), con tained in the domain of its infinitesimal generator, is not a-weakly dense.

This volume contains refereed research or review papers presented at the 6th Seminar on Stochastic Processes, Random Fields and Applications, which took place at the Centro Stefano Franscini (Monte Verità) in Ascona, Switzerland, in May 2008. The seminar focused mainly on stochastic partial differential equations, especially large deviations and control problems, on infinite dimensional analysis, particle systems and financial engineering, especially energy markets and climate models. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers in stochastic analysis and professionals interested in stochastic methods in finance.

The book collects a series of papers centered on two main streams: Feynman path integral approach to Quantum Mechanics and statistical mechanics of quantum open systems. Key authors discuss the state-of-the-art within their fields of expertise. In addition, the volume includes a number of contributed papers with new results, which have been thoroughly refereed.The contributions in this volume highlight emergent research in the area of stochastic analysis and mathematical physics, focusing, in particular on Feynman functional integral approach and, on the other hand, in quantum probability. The book is addressed to an audience of mathematical physicists, as well as specialists in probability theory, stochastic analysis and operator algebras.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in: ? Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)? CC Proceedings ? Engineering & Physical Sciences