Lax and Nirenberg are two of the most distinguished mathematicians of our times. Their work on partial differential equations (PDEs) over the last half-century has dramatically advanced the subject and has profoundly influenced the course of mathematics. A huge part of the development in PDEs during this period has either been through their work, motivated by it or achieved by their postdocs and students. A large number of mathematicians honored these two exceptional scientists in a week-long conference in Venice (June 1996) on the occasion of their 70th birthdays. This volume contains the proceedings of the conference, which focused on the modern theory of nonlinear PDEs and their applications. Among the topics treated are turbulence, kinetic models of a rarefied gas, vortex filaments, dispersive waves, singular limits and blow-up solutions, conservation laws, Hamiltonian systems and others. The conference served as a forum for the dissemination of new scientific ideas and discoveries and enhanced scientific communication by bringing together such a large number of scientists working in related fields. THe event allowed the international mathematics community to honor two of its outstanding members.

The foundation for the subject of mathematical finance was laid nearly 100 years ago by Bachelier in his fundamental work, Theorie de la speculation. In this work, he provided the first treatment of Brownian motion. Since then, the research of Markowitz, and then of Black, Merton, Scholes, and Samuelson brought remarkable and important strides in the field. A few years later, Harrison and Kreps demonstrated the fundamental role of martingales and stochastic analysis in constructing and understanding models for financial markets. The connection opened the door for a flood of mathematical developments and growth. Concurrently with these mathematical advances, markets have grown, and developments in both academia and industry continue to expand. This lively activity inspired an AMS Short Course at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego (CA). The present volume includes the written results of that course. Articles are featured by an impressive list of recognized researchers and practitioners. Their contributions present deep results, pose challenging questions, and suggest directions for future research. This collection offers compelling introductory articles on this new, exciting, and rapidly growing field.

The articles of this book are written by leading experts in partial differential equations and their applications, who present overviews here of recent advances in this broad area of mathematics. The formation of shocks in fluids, modern numerical computation of turbulence, the breaking of the Einstein equations in a vacuum, the dynamics of defects in crystals, effects due to entropy in hyperbolic conservation laws, the Navier-Stokes and other limits of the Boltzmann equation, occupancy times for Brownian motion in a two dimensional wedge, and new methods of analyzing and solving integrable systems are some of this volume's subjects. The reader will find an exposition of important advances without a lot of technicalities and with an emphasis on the basic ideas of this field.

The aim of this Handbook is to acquaint the reader with the current status of the theory of evolutionary partial differential equations, and with some of its applications. Evolutionary partial differential equations made their first appearance in the 18th century, in the endeavor to understand the motion of fluids and other continuous media. The active research effort over the span of two centuries, combined with the wide variety of physical phenomena that had to be explained, has resulted in an enormous body of literature. Any attempt to produce a comprehensive survey would be futile. The aim here is to collect review articles, written by leading experts, which will highlight the present and expected future directions of development of the field. The emphasis will be on nonlinear equations, which pose the most challenging problems today.. Volume I of this Handbook does focus on the abstract theory of evolutionary equations. . Volume 2 considers more concrete problems relating to specific applications. . Together they provide a panorama of this amazingly complex and rapidly developing branch of mathematics.

What is the shape of data? How do we describe flows? Can we count by integrating? How do we plan with uncertainty? What is the most compact representation? These questions, while unrelated, become similar when recast into a computational setting. Our input is a set of finite, discrete, noisy samples that describes an abstract space. Our goal is to compute qualitative features of the unknown space. It turns out that topology is sufficiently tolerant to provide us with robust tools. This volume is based on lectures delivered at the 2011 AMS Short Course on Computational Topology, held January 4-5, 2011 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The aim of the volume is to provide a broad introduction to recent techniques from applied and computational topology. Afra Zomorodian focuses on topological data analysis via efficient construction of combinatorial structures and recent theories of persistence. Marian Mrozek analyzes asymptotic behavior of dynamical systems via efficient computation of cubical homology. Justin Curry, Robert Ghrist, and Michael Robinson present Euler Calculus, an integral calculus based on the Euler characteristic, and apply it to sensor and network data aggregation. Michael Erdmann explores the relationship of topology, planning, and probability with the strategy complex. Jeff Erickson surveys algorithms and hardness results for topological optimization problems.