This volume contains survey articles and original research papers, presenting the state of the art on applying the symbolic approach of Gröbner bases and related methods to differential and difference equations. The contributions are based on talks delivered at the Special Semester on Gröbner Bases and Related Methods hosted by the Johann Radon Institute of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Linz, Austria, in May 2006.

Comprehensive account of theory and applications of Gröbner bases, co-edited by the subject's inventor.

The book presents the state of the art and results and also includes articles pointing to future developments. Most of the articles center around the theme of linear partial differential equations. Major aspects are fast solvers in elastoplasticity, symbolic analysis for boundary problems, symbolic treatment of operators, computer algebra, and finite element methods, a symbolic approach to finite difference schemes, cylindrical algebraic decomposition and local Fourier analysis, and white noise analysis for stochastic partial differential equations. Further numerical-symbolic topics range from applied and computational geometry to computer algebra methods used for total variation energy minimization.

The origins of the mathematics in this book date back more than two thou sand years, as can be seen from the fact that one of the most important algorithms presented here bears the name of the Greek mathematician Eu clid. The word "algorithm" as well as the key word "algebra" in the title of this book come from the name and the work of the ninth-century scientist Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizmi, who was born in what is now Uzbek istan and worked in Baghdad at the court of Harun al-Rashid's son. The word "algorithm" is actually a westernization of al-Khowarizmi's name, while "algebra" derives from "al-jabr," a term that appears in the title of his book Kitab al-jabr wa'l muqabala, where he discusses symbolic methods for the solution of equations. This close connection between algebra and al gorithms lasted roughly up to the beginning of this century; until then, the primary goal of algebra was the design of constructive methods for solving equations by means of symbolic transformations. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a new line of thought began to enter algebra from the realm of geometry, where it had been successful since Euclid's time, namely, the axiomatic method.

This book aims at reviewing recent progress in the direction of algebraic and symbolic computation methods for functional systems, e.g. ODE systems, differential time-delay equations, difference equations and integro-differential equations. In the nineties, modern algebraic theories were introduced in mathematical systems theory and in control theory. Combined with real algebraic geometry, which was previously introduced in control theory, the past years have seen a flourishing development of algebraic methods in control theory. One of the strengths of algebraic methods lies in their close connections to computations. The use of the above-mentioned algebraic theories in control theory has been an important source of motivation to develop effective versions of these theories (when possible). With the development of computer algebra and computer algebra systems, symbolic methods for control theory have been developed over the past years. The goal of this book is to propose a partial state of the art in this direction. To make recent results more easily accessible to a large audience, the chapters include materials which survey the main mathematical methods and results and which are illustrated with explicit examples.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Meeting on Algebraic and Algorithmic Aspects of Differential and Integral Operators, AADIOS 2012, held at the Applications of Computer Algebra Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, on June 25-28, 2012. The total of 9 papers presented in this volume consists of 2 invited papers and 7 regular papers which were carefully reviewed and selected from 13 submissions. The topics of interest are: symbolic computation for operator algebras, factorization of differential/integral operators, linear boundary problems and green's operators, initial value problems for differential equations, symbolic integration and differential galois theory, symbolic operator calculi, algorithmic D-module theory, rota-baxter algebra, differential algebra, as well as discrete analogs and software aspects of the above.

Investigating the correspondence between systems of partial differential equations and their analytic solutions using a formal approach, this monograph presents algorithms to determine the set of analytic solutions of such a system and conversely to find differential equations whose set of solutions coincides with a given parametrized set of analytic functions. After giving a detailed introduction to Janet bases and Thomas decomposition, the problem of finding an implicit description of certain sets of analytic functions in terms of differential equations is addressed. Effective methods of varying generality are developed to solve the differential elimination problems that arise in this context. In particular, it is demonstrated how the symbolic solution of partial differential equations profits from the study of the implicitization problem. For instance, certain families of exact solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations can be computed.