The purpose of this book is to give an introduction to the Laplace transform on the undergraduate level. The material is drawn from notes for a course taught by the author at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Based on classroom experience, an attempt has been made to (1) keep the proofs short, (2) introduce applications as soon as possible, (3) concentrate on problems that are difficult to handle by the older classical methods, and (4) emphasize periodic phenomena. To make it possible to offer the course early in the curriculum (after differential equations), no knowledge of complex...

In 1979, I edited Volume 18 in this series: Solution Methods for Integral Equations: Theory and Applications. Since that time, there has been an explosive growth in all aspects of the numerical solution of integral equations. By my estimate over 2000 papers on this subject have been published in the last decade, and more than 60 books on theory and applications have appeared. In particular, as can be seen in many of the chapters in this book, integral equation techniques are playing an increas- ingly important role in the solution of many scientific and engineering problems. For instance, the...

After the IUTAM Symposium on Optimization in Structural Design held in Warsaw in 1973, it was clear to me that the time had come for organizing into a consistent body of thought the enormous quantity of results obtained in this domain, studied from so many different points of view, with so many different methods, and at so many levels of practical applicability. My colleague and friend Gianantonnio Sacchi from Milan and I met with Professor Prager in Savognin in July 1974, where I submitted to them my first ideas for a treatise on structural optimization: It should cover the whole domain from...

This volume is a collection of contributions to the subject of multicriteria decision making and differential games, all of which are based wholly or in part on papers that have appeared in the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications. The authors take this opportunity to revise, update, or enlarge upon their earlier publications. The theory of multicriteria decision making and differential games is concerned with situations in which a single decision maker is faced with a multiplicity of usually incompatible criteria, performance indices or payoffs, or in which a number of decision...

This book introduces two most important aspects of modern analysis: the theory of measure and integration and the theory of Banach and Hilbert spaces. It is designed to serve as a text for first-year graduate students who are already familiar with some analysis as given in a book similar to Apostol's Mathematical Analysis. t This book treats in sufficient detail most relevant topics in the area of real and functional analysis that can be included in a book of this nature and size and at the level indicated above. It can serve as a text for a solid one-year course entitled "Measure and...

In the late 1950's, the group of Soviet mathematicians consisting of L. S. Pontryagin, V. G. Boltyanskii, R. V. Gamkrelidze, and E. F. Mishchenko made fundamental contributions to optimal control theory. Much of their work was collected in their monograph, The Mathematical Theory of Optimal Processes. Subsequently, Professor Gamkrelidze made further important contributions to the theory of necessary conditions for problems of optimal control and general optimization problems. In the present monograph, Professor Gamkrelidze presents his current view of the fundamentals of optimal control...

This book is a self-contained text devoted to the numerical determination of optimal inputs for system identification. It presents the current state of optimal inputs with extensive background material on optimization and system identification. The field of optimal inputs has been an area of considerable research recently with important advances by R. Mehra, G. c. Goodwin, M. Aoki, and N. E. Nahi, to name just a few eminent in- vestigators. The authors' interest in optimal inputs first developed when F. E. Yates, an eminent physiologist, expressed the need for optimal or preferred inputs to...

This book is devoted to the mathematical optimization theory and modeling techniques that recently have been applied to the problem of controlling the shape and intensity of the power density distribution in the core of large nuclear reactors. The book has been prepared with the following purposes in mind: 1. To provide, in a condensed manner, the background preparation on reactor kinetics required for a comprehensive description of the main problems encountered in designing spatial control systems for nuclear reactor cores. 2. To present the work that has already been done on this subject...

We are rarely asked to. make decisions based on only one criterion; most often, decisions are based on several usually confticting, criteria. In nature, if the design of a system evolves to some final, optimal state, then it must include a balance for the interaction of the system with its surroundings- certainly a design based on a variety of criteria. Furthermore, the diversity of nature's designs suggests an infinity of such optimal states. In another sense, decisions simultaneously optimize a finite number of criteria, while there is usually an infinity of optimal solutions. Multicriteria...

This book represents an extended and substantially revised version of my earlierbook, Optimal Control in Problems ofMathematical Physics, originally published in Russian in 1975. About 60% of the text has been completely revised and major additions have been included which have produced a practically new text. My aim was to modernize the presentation but also to preserve the original results, some of which are little known to a Western reader. The idea of composites, which is the core of the modern theory of optimization, was initiated in the early seventies. The reader will find here its...