This book offers a selection of papers based on talks at the Ninth International Workshop on Real and Complex Singularities, a series of biennial workshops organized by the Singularity Theory group at Sao Carlos, S.P., Brazil. The papers deal with all the different topics in singularity theory and its applications, from pure singularity theory related to commutative algebra and algebraic geometry to those topics associated with various aspects of geometry to homotopytheory.

This book presents contributions on topics ranging from novel applications of topological analysis for particular problems, through studies of the effectiveness of modern topological methods, algorithmic improvements on existing methods, and parallel computation of topological structures, all the way to mathematical topologies not previously applied to data analysis. Topological methods are broadly recognized as valuable tools for analyzing the ever-increasing flood of data generated by simulation or acquisition. This is particularly the case in scientific visualization, where the data sets have long since surpassed the ability of the human mind to absorb every single byte of data. The biannual TopoInVis workshop has supported researchers in this area for a decade, and continues to serve as a vital forum for the presentation and discussion of novel results in applications in the area, creating a platform to disseminate knowledge about such implementations throughout and beyond the community. The present volume, resulting from the 2015 TopoInVis workshop held in Annweiler, Germany, will appeal to researchers in the fields of scientific visualization and mathematics, domain scientists with an interest in advanced visualization methods, and developers of visualization software systems.

This book is a collection of papers presented at the Forum “The Impact of Applications on Mathematics” in October 2013. It describes an appropriate framework in which to highlight how real-world problems, over the centuries and today, have influenced and are influencing the development of mathematics and thereby, how mathematics is reshaped, in order to advance mathematics and its application. The contents of this book address productive and successful interaction between industry and mathematicians, as well as the cross-fertilization and collaboration that result when mathematics is involved with the advancement of science and technology.

The modern theory of singularities provides a unifying theme that runs through fields of mathematics as diverse as homological algebra and Hamiltonian systems. It is also an important point of reference in the development of a large part of contemporary algebra, geometry and analysis. Presented by internationally recognized experts, the collection of articles in this volume yields a significant cross-section of these developments.The wide range of surveys includes an authoritative treatment of the deformation theory of isolated complex singularities by prize-winning researcher K Miyajima. Graduate students and even ambitious undergraduates in mathematics will find many research ideas in this volume and non-experts in mathematics can have an overview of some classic and fundamental results in singularity theory. The explanations are detailed enough to capture the interest of the curious reader, and complete enough to provide the necessary background material needed to go further into the subject and explore the research literature.

A phenomenon which appears in nature, or human behavior, can sometimes be explained by saying that a certain potential function is maximized, or minimized. For example, the Hamiltonian mechanics, soapy films, size of an atom, business management, etc. In mathematics, a point where a given function attains an extreme value is called a critical point, or a singular point. The purpose of singularity theory is to explore the properties of singular points of functions and mappings.This is a volume on the proceedings of the fourth Japanese-Australian Workshop on Real and Complex Singularities held in Kobe, Japan. It consists of 11 original articles on singularities. Readers will be introduced to some important new notions for characterizations of singularities and several interesting results are delivered. In addition, current approaches to classical topics and state-of-the-art effective computational methods of invariants of singularities are also presented. This volume will be useful not only to the singularity theory specialists but also to general mathematicians.