In April 2007, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) approved the Priority Program 1324 "Mathematical Methods for Extracting Quantifiable Information from Complex Systems." This volume presents a comprehensive overview of the most important results obtained over the course of the program. Mathematical models of complex systems provide the foundation for further technological developments in science, engineering and computational finance. Motivated by the trend toward steadily increasing computer power, ever more realistic models have been developed in recent years. These models have also...

There have been substantial developments in meshfree methods, particle methods, and generalized finite element methods since the mid 1990s. The growing interest in these methods is in part due to the fact that they offer extremely flexible numerical tools and can be interpreted in a number of ways. For instance, meshfree methods can be viewed as a natural extension of classical finite element and finite difference methods to scattered node configurations with no fixed connectivity. Furthermore, meshfree methods have a number of advantageous features that are especially attractive when dealing...

The contributions gathered here provide an overview of current research projects and selected software products of the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI.