Kolmogorov Operators and Their Applications


Book Description

Kolmogorov equations are a fundamental bridge between the theory of partial differential equations and that of stochastic differential equations that arise in several research fields. This volume collects a selection of the talks given at the Cortona meeting by experts in both fields, who presented the most recent developments of the theory. Particular emphasis has been given to degenerate partial differential equations, Itô processes, applications to kinetic theory and to finance.




Stochastic Processes and Applications


Book Description

This book presents various results and techniques from the theory of stochastic processes that are useful in the study of stochastic problems in the natural sciences. The main focus is analytical methods, although numerical methods and statistical inference methodologies for studying diffusion processes are also presented. The goal is the development of techniques that are applicable to a wide variety of stochastic models that appear in physics, chemistry and other natural sciences. Applications such as stochastic resonance, Brownian motion in periodic potentials and Brownian motors are studied and the connection between diffusion processes and time-dependent statistical mechanics is elucidated. The book contains a large number of illustrations, examples, and exercises. It will be useful for graduate-level courses on stochastic processes for students in applied mathematics, physics and engineering. Many of the topics covered in this book (reversible diffusions, convergence to equilibrium for diffusion processes, inference methods for stochastic differential equations, derivation of the generalized Langevin equation, exit time problems) cannot be easily found in textbook form and will be useful to both researchers and students interested in the applications of stochastic processes.




Operator Theory, Function Spaces, and Applications


Book Description

This volume collects a selected number of papers presented at the International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications (IWOTA) held in July 2014 at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Main developments in the broad area of operator theory are covered, with special emphasis on applications to science and engineering. The volume also presents papers dedicated to the eightieth birthday of Damir Arov and to the sixty-fifth birthday of Leiba Rodman, both leading figures in the area of operator theory and its applications, in particular, to systems theory.




Degenerate Diffusion Operators Arising in Population Biology


Book Description

This book provides the mathematical foundations for the analysis of a class of degenerate elliptic operators defined on manifolds with corners, which arise in a variety of applications such as population genetics, mathematical finance, and economics. The results discussed in this book prove the uniqueness of the solution to the Martingale problem and therefore the existence of the associated Markov process. Charles Epstein and Rafe Mazzeo use an "integral kernel method" to develop mathematical foundations for the study of such degenerate elliptic operators and the stochastic processes they define. The precise nature of the degeneracies of the principal symbol for these operators leads to solutions of the parabolic and elliptic problems that display novel regularity properties. Dually, the adjoint operator allows for rather dramatic singularities, such as measures supported on high codimensional strata of the boundary. Epstein and Mazzeo establish the uniqueness, existence, and sharp regularity properties for solutions to the homogeneous and inhomogeneous heat equations, as well as a complete analysis of the resolvent operator acting on Hölder spaces. They show that the semigroups defined by these operators have holomorphic extensions to the right half-plane. Epstein and Mazzeo also demonstrate precise asymptotic results for the long-time behavior of solutions to both the forward and backward Kolmogorov equations.




Computer Aided Systems Theory – EUROCAST 2005


Book Description

The concept of CAST, computer aided systems Theory, was introduced by F. Pichler of Linz in the late 1980s to include those computer theoretical and practical developments used as tools to solve problems in system science. It was considered as the third component (the other two being CAD and CAM) that would provide for a complete picture of the path from computer and systems sciences to practical developments in science and engineering. The University of Linz organized the first CAST workshop in April 1988, which demonstrated the acceptance of the concepts by the scientific and technical community. Next, the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria joined the University of Linz to organize the first international meeting on CAST (Las Palmas February 1989), under the name EUROCAST 1989, a very successful gathering of systems theorists, computer scientists and engineers from most European countries, North America and Japan. It was agreed that EUROCAST international conferences would be organized every two years. Thus, the following EUROCAST meetings took place in Krems (1991), Las Palmas (1993), Innsbruck (1995), Las Palmas (1997), Vienna (1999), Las Palmas (2001) and Las Palmas (2003) in addition to an extra-European CAST conference in Ottawa in 1994. Selected papers from those meetings were published as Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science vols. 410, 585, 763, 1030, 1333, 1728, 2178 and 2809 and in several special issues of Cybernetics and Systems: an lnternational Journal.




Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov Equations


Book Description

This book gives an exposition of the principal concepts and results related to second order elliptic and parabolic equations for measures, the main examples of which are Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov equations for stationary and transition probabilities of diffusion processes. Existence and uniqueness of solutions are studied along with existence and Sobolev regularity of their densities and upper and lower bounds for the latter. The target readership includes mathematicians and physicists whose research is related to diffusion processes as well as elliptic and parabolic equations.




Analytical Methods for Kolmogorov Equations


Book Description

The second edition of this book has a new title that more accurately reflects the table of contents. Over the past few years, many new results have been proven in the field of partial differential equations. This edition takes those new results into account, in particular the study of nonautonomous operators with unbounded coefficients, which has received great attention. Additionally, this edition is the first to use a unified approach to contain the new results in a singular place.




Geometric Analysis and Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations


Book Description

This book is not a textbook, but rather a coherent collection of papers from the field of partial differential equations. Nevertheless we believe that it may very well serve as a good introduction into some topics of this classical field of analysis which, despite of its long history, is highly modem and well prospering. Richard Courant wrote in 1950: "It has always been a temptationfor mathematicians to present the crystallized product of their thought as a deductive general theory and to relegate the individual mathematical phenomenon into the role of an example. The reader who submits to the dogmatic form will be easily indoctrinated. Enlightenment, however, must come from an understanding of motives; live mathematical development springs from specific natural problems which can be easily understood, but whose solutions are difficult and demand new methods or more general significance. " We think that many, if not all, papers of this book are written in this spirit and will give the reader access to an important branch of analysis by exhibiting interest ing problems worth to be studied. Most of the collected articles have an extensive introductory part describing the history of the presented problems as well as the state of the art and offer a well chosen guide to the literature. This way the papers became lengthier than customary these days, but the level of presentation is such that an advanced graduate student should find the various articles both readable and stimulating.




Semigroups of Operators – Theory and Applications


Book Description

This book features selected and peer-reviewed lectures presented at the 3rd Semigroups of Operators: Theory and Applications Conference, held in Kazimierz Dolny, Poland, in October 2018 to mark the 85th birthday of Jan Kisyński. Held every five years, the conference offers a forum for mathematicians using semigroup theory to discover what is happening outside their particular field of research and helps establish new links between various sub-disciplines of semigroup theory, stochastic processes, differential equations and the applied fields. The book is intended for researchers, postgraduate and senior students working in operator theory, partial differential equations, probability and stochastic processes, analytical methods in biology and other natural sciences, optimisation and optimal control. The theory of semigroups of operators is a well-developed branch of functional analysis. Its foundations were laid at the beginning of the 20th century, while Hille and Yosida’s fundamental generation theorem dates back to the forties. The theory was originally designed as a universal language for partial differential equations and stochastic processes but, at the same time, it started to become an independent branch of operator theory. Today, it still has the same distinctive character: it develops rapidly by posing new ‘internal’ questions and, in answering them, discovering new methods that can be used in applications. On the other hand, it is being influenced by questions from PDE’s and stochastic processes as well as from applied sciences such as mathematical biology and optimal control and, as a result, it continually gathers new momentum. However, many results, both from semigroup theory itself and the applied sciences, are phrased in discipline-specific languages and are hardly known to the broader community.