Lawrence Sirovich will turn seventy on March 1, 2003. Larry's academic life of over 45 years at the Courant Institute, Brown University, Rockefeller University and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine has touched many peo ple and several disciplines, from fluid dynamics to brain theory. His con tributions to the kinetic theory of gases, methods of applied mathematics, theoretical fluid dynamics, hydrodynamic turbulence, the biophysics of vi sion and the dynamics of neuronal populations, represent the creative work of an outstanding scholar who was stimulated mostly by insatiable curios ity. As...

This book gives a new and direct approach into the theories of special functions with emphasis on spherical symmetry in Euclidean spaces of ar- bitrary dimensions. Essential parts may even be called elementary because of the chosen techniques. The central topic is the presentation of spherical harmonics in a theory of invariants of the orthogonal group. H. Weyl was one of the first to point out that spherical harmonics must be more than a fortunate guess to simplify numerical computations in mathematical physics. His opinion arose from his occupation with quan- tum mechanics and was supported...

From the Preface: "The material in this book is based on notes for a course which I gave several times at Brown University. The target of the course was juniors and seniors majoring in applied mathematics, engineering and other sciences. My basic goal in the course was to teach standard methods, or what I regard as a basic "bag of tricks." In my opinion the material contained here, for the most part, does not depart widely from traditional subject matter. One such departure is the discussion of discrete linear systems. Besides being interesting in its own right, this topic is included...

Motivation The latest texts on linear systems for engineering students have begun incorpo- rating chapters on robust control using the state space approach to HOC control for linear finite dimensional time-invariant systems. While the pedagogical and computational advantages of this approach are not to be underestimated, there are, in my opinion, some disadvantages. Among these disadvantages is the narrow viewpoint that arises from the amputation of the finite dimensional time-invariant case from the much more general theory that had been developed using frequency domain methods. The...

Mathematics is playing an ever more important role in the physical and biological sciences, provo king a blurring of boundaries between scientific dis- ciplines and a resurgence of interest in the modern as weil as the classical techniques of applied mathematics. This renewal of interest, both in research and teaching, has led to the establishment of the series: Texts in Applied Mathe- matics (TAM). The development of new courses is a natural consequence of a . high level of excitement on the research frontier as newer techniques, such as numerical and symbolic computer systems, dynamical...

This book discusses both the theory and applications of Markov chains. The author studies both discrete-time and continuous-time chains and connected topics such as finite Gibbs fields, non-homogeneous Markov chains, discrete time regenerative processes, Monte Carlo simulation, simulated annealing, and queueing networks are also developed in this accessible and self-contained text. The text is firstly an introduction to the theory of stochastic processes at the undergraduate or beginning graduate level. Its primary objective is to initiate the student to the art of stochastic modelling. The...

These notes originate from a one semester course which forms part of the "Math Methods" cycle at Brown. In the hope that these notes might prove useful for reference purposes several additional sections have been included and also a table of contents and index. Although asymptotic analysis is now enjoying a period of great vitality, these notes do not reflect a research oriented course. The course is aimed toward people in applied mathematics, physics, engineering, etc., who have a need for asymptotic analysis in their work. The choice of subjects has been largely dictated by the likelihood...