On April 29, 1814 Napoleon landed on the island of Elba, surrounded with a personal army of 1200 men. The allies, Russia, Prussia, England and Austria, hadforcedhimintoexileafteranumberofverycostlydefeats;hewasdeprived ofallhistitles, butcouldkeepthetitleof"EmperorofElba". Historytellsusthat each morning he took long walks in the sun, reviewed his army each midday anddiscussedworldmatterswithnewlyappointedadvisors, followingthesame pattern everyday, to the great surprise of Campbell, the British of?cer who was to keep an eye on him. All this made everyone believe he was settled there for good. Napoleononcesaid:Elbaisbeautiful, butabitsmall. Elbawasde?nitely a source of inspiration; indeed, the early morning, March 6, 1815, Metternich, the chancellor of Austria was woken up by one of his aides with the stunning news that Napoleon had left Elba with his 1200 men and was marching to Paris with little resistance; A few days later he took up his throne again in the Tuileries. In spite of his insatiable hunger for battles and expansion, he is remembered as an important statesman. He was a pioneer in setting up much of the legal, administrative and political machinery in large parts of continental Europe. We gathered here in a lovely and quaint?shing port, Marciana Marina on theislandofElba, tocelebrateoneofthepioneersofintegrablesystems, Hirota Sensei, andthisattheoccasionofhisseventiethbirthday. Trainedasaphysicist in his home university Kyushu University, Professor Hirota earned his PhD in '61 at Northwestern University with Professor Siegert in the?eld of "Quantum Statistical mechanics". He wrote a widely appreciated Doctoral dissertation on "FunctionalIntegralrepresentationofthegrandpartitionfunction."

This is a book comprising selected papers of colleagues and friends of Heinrich Begehr on the occasion of his 80th birthday. It aims at being a tribute to the excellent achievements of Heinrich Begehr in complex analysis and complex differential equations, and especially to his prominent role as one of the creators and long-time leader of the International Society for Analysis, its Applications and Computation (ISAAC).

This volume highlights the main results of the research performed within the network “Harmonic and Complex Analysis and its Applications” (HCAA), which was a five-year (2007–2012) European Science Foundation Programme intended to explore and to strengthen the bridge between two scientific communities: analysts with broad backgrounds in complex and harmonic analysis and mathematical physics, and specialists in physics and applied sciences. It coordinated actions for advancing harmonic and complex analysis and for expanding its application to challenging scientific problems. Particular topics considered by this Programme included conformal and quasiconformal mappings, potential theory, Banach spaces of analytic functions and their applications to the problems of fluid mechanics, conformal field theory, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics, and signal processing. This book is a collection of surveys written as a result of activities of the Programme and will be interesting and useful for professionals and novices in analysis and mathematical physics, as well as for graduate students. Browsing the volume, the reader will undoubtedly notice that, as the scope of the Programme is rather broad, there are many interrelations between the various contributions, which can be regarded as different facets of a common theme.

This monograph covers a multitude of concepts, results, and research topics originating from a classical moving-boundary problem in two dimensions (idealized Hele-Shaw flows, or classical Laplacian growth), which has strong connections to many exciting modern developments in mathematics and theoretical physics. Of particular interest are the relations between Laplacian growth and the infinite-size limit of ensembles of random matrices with complex eigenvalues; integrable hierarchies of differential equations and their spectral curves; classical and stochastic Löwner evolution and critical phenomena in two-dimensional statistical models; weak solutions of hyperbolic partial differential equations of singular-perturbation type; and resolution of singularities for compact Riemann surfaces with anti-holomorphic involution. The book also provides an abundance of exact classical solutions, many explicit examples of dynamics by conformal mapping as well as a solid foundation of potential theory. An extensive bibliography covering over twelve decades of results and an introduction rich in historical and biographical details complement the eight main chapters of this monograph. Given its systematic and consistent notation and background results, this book provides a self-contained resource. It is accessible to a wide readership, from beginner graduate students to researchers from various fields in natural sciences and mathematics.

This book studies solutions of the Polubarinova–Galin and Löwner–Kufarev equations, which describe the evolution of a viscous fluid (Hele-Shaw) blob, after the time when these solutions have lost their physical meaning due to loss of univalence of the mapping function involved. When the mapping function is no longer locally univalent interesting phase transitions take place, leading to structural changes in the data of the solution, for example new zeros and poles in the case of rational maps. This topic intersects with several areas, including mathematical physics, potential theory and complex analysis. The text will be valuable to researchers and doctoral students interested in fluid dynamics, integrable systems, and conformal field theory.

This monograph presents recent and new ideas arising from the study of problems of planar fluid dynamics, and which are interesting from the point of view of geometric function theory and potential theory. the book is concerned with geometric problems for Hele-Shaw flows. Additionally, Hele-Shaw flows on parameter spaces are discussed, and connections with string theory are revealed. Assumes a graduate level understanding of real and complex analysis, and fluid mechanics.