Two essays written by well-known mathematician Ilan Vardi, who is currently living in France, constitute the book's core. The first essay presents a thorough analysis of contrived problems given to "undesirable" applicants to the Department of Mathematics, Moscow University. The second essay is an in-depth discussion of solutions to the International Mathematical Olympiad of 2000, with emphasis on the comparison of the Olympiad problems to those of the Moscow University entrance examinations." "The second part of the book provides a historical background of a unique phenomenon in mathematics that flourished in the 1970s and 80s in the USSR. Specially designed math problems were not used to test students' ingenuity and creativity; rather, they served as "killer problems," to deny "undesirable" applicants access to higher education. The focus of this part of the book is the 1980 essay Intellectual Genocide by B. Kanevsky and V. Senderov, published here for the first time.

Published in honour of Professor Gu Chaohao, this work covers subjects closely related to differential geometry, partial differential equations and mathematical physics, the major areas in which Professor Gu has received notable achievements.

The papers in this text are concerned mainly with the development of methods for "sequencing" - determination of the order of the amino acids in proteins and of nucleotides in RNA and DNA. They describe the improvements in techniques and biological results revealed by the sequences.

This book gives a systematic and comprehensive presentation of the results concerning effective behavior of elastic and plastic plates with periodic or quasiperiodic structure. One of the chapters covers the hitherto available results concerning the averaging problems in the linear and nonlinear shell models. A unified approach to the problems studied is based on modern variational and asymptotic methods, including the methods of variational inequalities as well as homogenization techniques. Duality arguments are also exploited. A significant part of the book deals with problems important for engineering practice, such as: statical analysis of highly nonhomogeneous plates and shells for which common discretization techniques fail to be efficient, assessing stiffness reduction of cracked [00n/900m]s laminates, and assessing ultimate loads for perfectly plastic plates and shells composed of repeated segments. When possible, the homogenization formulas are cast in closed form expressions. The formulas presented in this manner are then used in constructing regularized formulations of the fundamental optimization problems for plates and shells, since the regularization concepts are based on introducing the composite regions for which microstructural properties play the role of new design variables

This volume is on initial-boundary value problems for parabolic partial differential equations of second order. It rewrites the problems as abstract Cauchy problems or evolution equations, and then solves them by the technique of elementary difference equations. Because of this, the volume assumes less background and provides an easy approach for readers to understand. Contents: Existence Theorems for Cauchy Problems; Existence Theorems for Evolution Equations (I); Linear Autonomous Parabolic Equations; Nonlinear Autonomous Parabolic Equations; Linear Non-autonomous Parabolic Equations; Nonlin