This festschrift volume in honour of Donald B McAlister on the occasion of his 65th birthday presents papers from leading researchers in semigroups and formal languages. The contributors cover a number of areas of current interest: from pseudovarieties and regular languages to ordered groupoids and one-relator groups, and from semigroup algebras to presentations of monoids and transformation semigroups. The papers are accessible to graduate students as well as researchers seeking new directions for future work.

The 17 invited research articles in this volume, all written by leading experts in their respective fields, are dedicated to the great French mathematician Jean Leray. A wide range of topics with significant new results---detailed proofs---are presented in the areas of partial differential equations, complex analysis, and mathematical physics. Key subjects are: * Treated from the mathematical physics viewpoint: nonlinear stability of an expanding universe, the compressible Euler equation, spin groups and the Leray--Maslov index, * Linked to the Cauchy problem: an intermediate case between effective hyperbolicity and the Levi condition, global Cauchy--Kowalewski theorem in some Gevrey classes, the analytic continuation of the solution, necessary conditions for hyperbolic systems, well posedness in the Gevrey class, uniformly diagonalizable systems and reduced dimension, and monodromy of ramified Cauchy problem. Additional articles examine results on: * Local solvability for a system of partial differential operators, * The hypoellipticity of second order operators, * Differential forms and Hodge theory on analytic spaces, * Subelliptic operators and sub- Riemannian geometry. Contributors: V. Ancona, R. Beals, A. Bove, R. Camales, Y. Choquet- Bruhat, F. Colombini, M. De Gosson, S. De Gosson, M. Di Flaviano, B. Gaveau, D. Gourdin, P. Greiner, Y. Hamada, K. Kajitani, M. Mechab, K. Mizohata, V. Moncrief, N. Nakazawa, T. Nishitani, Y. Ohya, T. Okaji, S. Ouchi, S. Spagnolo, J. Vaillant, C. Wagschal, S. Wakabayashi The book is suitable as a reference text for graduate students and active researchers.