I am very pleased that my books about David Hilbert, published in 1970, and Richard Courant, published in 1976, are now being issued by Springer Verlag in a single volume. I have always felt that they belonged together, Courant being, as I have written, the natural and necessary sequel to Hilbert the rest of the story. To make the two volumes more compatible when published as one, we have combined and brought up to date the indexes of names and dates. U nfortu nately we have had to omit Hermann Weyl's article on "David Hilbert and his mathematical work," but the interested reader can always find it in the hard back edition of Hilbert and in Weyl's collected papers. At the request of a number of readers we have included a listing of all of Hilbert's famous Paris problems. It was, of course, inevitable that we would give the resulting joint volume the title Hilbert-Courant.

This volume expands on a set of lectures held at the Courant Institute on Riemann-Hilbert problems, orthogonal polynomials, and random matrix theory. The goal of the course was to prove universality for a variety of statistical quantities arising in the theory of random matrix models. The central question was the following: Why do very general ensembles of random n times n matrices exhibit universal behavior as n > infinity? The main ingredient in the proof is the steepest descent method for oscillatory Riemann-Hilbert problems. Titles in this series are copublished with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

From the reviews: "...one of the best textbooks introducing several generations of mathematicians to higher mathematics. ... This excellent book is highly recommended both to instructors and students." --Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum, 1991

The teaching and learning of mathematics has degenerated into the realm of rote memorization, the outcome of which leads to satisfactory formal ability but not real understanding or greater intellectual independence. The new edition of this classic work seeks to address this problem. Its goal is to put the meaning back into mathematics. "Lucid . . . easily understandable".--Albert Einstein. 301 linecuts.

This volume comprises a carefully selected collection of articles emerging from and pertinent to the 2010 CFL-80 conference in Rio de Janeiro, celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition. A major result in the field of numerical analysis, the CFL condition has influenced the research of many important mathematicians over the past eight decades, and this work is meant to take stock of its most important and current applications. The Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy (CFL) Condition: 80 Years After its Discovery will be of interest to practicing mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and graduate students who work with numerical methods.

"It presents a sensitive portrait of a great human being. It describes accurately and intelligibly on a nontechnical level the world of mathematical ideas in which Hilbert created his masterpieces. And it illuminates the background of German social history against which the drama of Hilberts life was played. Beyond this, it is a poem in praise of mathematics." -SCIENCE