differential equations

This volume collects contributions from the speakers at an INdAM Intensive period held at the University of Bari in 2017. The contributions cover several aspects of partial differential equations whose development in recent years has experienced major breakthroughs in terms of both theory and applications. The topics covered include nonlocal equations, elliptic equations and systems, fully nonlinear equations, nonlinear parabolic equations, overdetermined boundary value problems, maximum principles, geometric analysis, control theory, mean field games, and bio-mathematics. The authors are trailblazers in these topics and present their work in a way that is exhaustive and clearly accessible to PhD students and early career researcher. As such, the book offers an excellent introduction to a variety of fundamental topics of contemporary investigation and inspires novel and high-quality research.

This volume collects contributions from the speakers at an INdAM Intensive period held at the University of Bari in 2017. The contributions cover several aspects of partial differential equations whose development in recent years has experienced major breakthroughs in terms of both theory and applications. The topics covered include nonlocal equations, elliptic equations and systems, fully nonlinear equations, nonlinear parabolic equations, overdetermined boundary value problems, maximum principles, geometric analysis, control theory, mean field games, and bio-mathematics. The authors are trailblazers in these topics and present their work in a way that is exhaustive and clearly accessible to PhD students and early career researcher. As such, the book offers an excellent introduction to a variety of fundamental topics of contemporary investigation and inspires novel and high-quality research.

This book demonstrates how delay differential equations (DDEs) can be used to compliment the laboratory investigation of human balancing tasks. This approach is made accessible to non-specialists by comparing mathematical predictions and experimental observations. For example, the observation that a longer pole is easier to balance on a fingertip than a shorter one demonstrates the essential role played by a time delay in the balance control mechanism. Another balancing task considered is postural sway during quiet standing. With the inverted pendulum as the driver and the feedback control depending on state variables or on an internal model, the feedback can be identified by determining a critical pendulum length and/or a critical delay. This approach is used to identify the nature of the feedback for the pole balancing and postural sway examples. Motivated by the question of how the nervous system deals with these feedback control challenges, there is a discussion of ‘’microchaotic’’ fluctuations in balance control and how robust control can be achieved in the face of uncertainties in the estimation of control parameters. The final chapter suggests some topics for future research.Each chapter includes an abstract and a point-by-point summary of the main concepts that have been established. A particularly useful numerical integration method for the DDEs that arise in balance control is semi-discretization. This method is described and a MATLAB template is provided.This book will be a useful source for anyone studying balance in humans, other bipedal organisms and humanoid robots. Much of the material has been used by the authors to teach senior undergraduates in computational neuroscience and students in bio-systems, biomedical, mechanical and neural engineering.

This textbook is a comprehensive treatment of ordinary differential equations, concisely presenting basic and essential results in a rigorous manner.
Including various examples from physics, mechanics, natural sciences, engineering and automatic theory, Differential Equations is a bridge between the abstract theory of differential equations and applied systems theory. Particular attention is given to the existence and uniqueness of the Cauchy problem, linear differential systems, stability theory and applications to first-order partial differential equations.
Upper undergraduate students and researchers in applied mathematics and systems theory with a background in advanced calculus will find this book particularly useful. Supplementary topics are covered in an appendix enabling the book to be completely self-contained.