In 1960 the Polish mathematician Zdzidlaw Opial (1930--1974) published an inequality involving integrals of a function and its derivative. This volume offers a systematic and up-to-date account of developments in Opial-type inequalities. The book presents a complete survey of results in the field, starting with Opial's landmark paper, traversing through its generalizations, extensions and discretizations. Some of the important applications of these inequalities in the theory of differential and difference equations, such as uniqueness of solutions of boundary value problems, and upper bounds of solutions are also presented. This book is suitable for graduate students and researchers in mathematical analysis and applications.

A study of difference equations and inequalities. This second edition offers real-world examples and uses of difference equations in probability theory, queuing and statistical problems, stochastic time series, combinatorial analysis, number theory, geometry, electrical networks, quanta in radiation, genetics, economics, psychology, sociology, and

Various applications of the homogenization theory of partial differential equations resulted in the further development of this branch of mathematics, attracting an increasing interest of both mathematicians and experts in other fields. In general, the theory deals with the following: Let Ak be a sequence of differential operators, linear or nonlinepr. We want to examine the asymptotic behaviour of solutions uk to the equation Auk = f, as k ~ =, provided coefficients of Ak contain rapid oscillations. This is the case, e. g. when the coefficients are of the form a(e/x), where the function a(y) is periodic and ek ~ 0 ask~=. Of course, of oscillation, like almost periodic or random homogeneous, are of many other kinds interest as well. It seems a good idea to find a differential operator A such that uk ~ u, where u is a solution of the limit equation Au = f Such a limit operator is usually called the homogenized operator for the sequence Ak . Sometimes, the term "averaged" is used instead of "homogenized". Let us look more closely what kind of convergence one can expect for uk. Usually, we have some a priori bound for the solutions. However, due to the rapid oscillations of the coefficients, such a bound may be uniform with respect to k in the corresponding energy norm only. Therefore, we may have convergence of solutions only in the weak topology of the energy space.

On becoming familiar with difference equations and their close re lation to differential equations, I was in hopes that the theory of difference equations could be brought completely abreast with that for ordinary differential equations. [HUGH L. TURRITTIN, My Mathematical Expectations, Springer Lecture Notes 312 (page 10), 1973] A major task of mathematics today is to harmonize the continuous and the discrete, to include them in one comprehensive mathematics, and to eliminate obscurity from both. [E. T. BELL, Men of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster, New York (page 13/14), 1937] The theory of time scales, which has recently received a lot of attention, was introduced by Stefan Hilger in his PhD thesis [159] in 1988 (supervised by Bernd Aulbach) in order to unify continuous and discrete analysis. This book is an intro duction to the study of dynamic equations on time scales. Many results concerning differential equations carryover quite easily to corresponding results for difference equations, while other results seem to be completely different in nature from their continuous counterparts. The study of dynamic equations on time scales reveals such discrepancies, and helps avoid proving results twice, once for differential equa tions and once for difference equations. The general idea is to prove a result for a dynamic equation where the domain of the unknown function is a so-called time scale, which is an arbitrary nonempty closed subset of the reals.

The theory of integral and integrodifferential equations has ad vanced rapidly over the last twenty years. Of course the question of existence is an age-old problem of major importance. This mono graph is a collection of some of the most advanced results to date in this field. The book is organized as follows. It is divided into twelve chap ters. Each chapter surveys a major area of research. Specifically, some of the areas considered are Fredholm and Volterra integral and integrodifferential equations, resonant and nonresonant problems, in tegral inclusions, stochastic equations and periodic problems. We note that the selected topics reflect the particular interests of the authors. Donal 0 'Regan Maria Meehan CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND PRELIMINARIES 1.1. Introduction The aim of this book is firstly to provide a comprehensive existence the ory for integral and integrodifferential equations, and secondly to present some specialised topics in integral equations which we hope will inspire fur ther research in the area. To this end, the first part of the book deals with existence principles and results for nonlinear, Fredholm and Volterra inte gral and integrodifferential equations on compact and half-open intervals, while selected topics (which reflect the particular interests of the authors) such as nonresonance and resonance problems, equations in Banach spaces, inclusions, and stochastic equations are presented in the latter part.

The international conference on which the book is based brought together many of the world's leading experts, with particular effort on the interaction between established scientists and emerging young promising researchers, as well as on the interaction of pure and applied mathematics. All material has been rigorously refereed. The contributions contain much material developed after the conference, continuing research and incorporating additional new results and improvements. In addition, some up-to-date surveys are included.

This book presents the theory of integration over surfaces in abstract topological vector space. Applications of the theory in different fields, such as infinite dimensional distributions and differential equations (including boundary value problems), stochastic processes, approximation of functions, and calculus of variation on a Banach space, are treated in detail. Audience: This book will be of interest to specialists in functional analysis, and those whose work involves measure and integration, probability theory and stochastic processes, partial differential equations and mathematical physics.