Summary

The present volume is comprised of contributions solicited from invitees to conferences held at the University of Houston, University of Jyv] askyl] a, and Xi'an Jiaotong University honoring the 70th birthday of Professor Roland Glowinski. Although scientists convened on three di'erent continents, the - itors prefer to view the meetings as single event. The three locales signify the fact Roland has friends, collaborators and admirers across the globe. The contents span a wide range of topics in contemporary applied mathematics rangingfrompopulationdynamics, to electromagnetics, to ?uidmechanics, to the mathematics of ?nance among others. However, they do not fully re'ect the breath and diversity of Roland's scienti'c interest. His work has always been at the intersection mathematics and scienti'c computing and their - plication to mechanics, physics, aeronautics, engineering sciences and more recently biology. He has made seminal contribution in the areas of methods for science computation, ?uid mechanics, numerical controls for distributed parameter systems, and solid and structural mechanics as well as shape - timization, stellar motion, electron transport, and semiconductor modeling. Two central themes arise from the corpus of Roland's work. The ?rst is that numerical methods should take advantage of the mathematical properties of themodel. Theyshouldbeportableandcomputablewithcomputingresources of the foreseeable future as well as with contemporary resources. The second theme is that whenever possible one should validate numerical with expe- mental data. The volume is written at an advanced scienti'c level and no e'ort has been made to make it self contained.