More frisbees are sold each year than baseballs, basketballs and footballs combined. Yet these familiar flying objects have subtle and clever aerodynamic and gyrodynamic properties which are only recently being documented by wind tunnel and other studies. In common with other rotating bodies discussed in this readily accessible book, they are typically not treated in textbooks of aeronautics and the literature is scattered in a variety of places. This book develops the theme of disc-wings and spinning aerospace vehicles in parallel. Since many of the examples are recreational, anyone who enjoys these activities will likely find it profitable and enjoyable. In addition to spinning objects of various shapes, several exotic manned aircraft with disc planforms have been proposed and a prototypes built – these include a Nazi ‘secret weapon’ and the De Havilland Avrocar, also discussed in the book. Boomerangs represent another category of spinning aerodynamic body whose behavior can only be understood by coupling aerodynamics with gyrodynamics. The narrative, supported by equations and graphs, explains how the shape and throw of a boomerang relates to its trajectory. The natural world presents still other examples, namely the samaras or ‘seed-wings’ of many tree species, which autorotate during their descent, like a helicopter whose engine has failed. The flight performance of these spinning wings directly affects the dispersal and thus the evolutionary competitiveness of the trees concerned. Samara-type configurations are also considered for instrumentation and other payload dispersal applications. In short, the book discusses a range of familiar, connected, but largely undeveloped, topics in an accessible, but complete, manner.

The International Meshing Roundtable (IMR) brings together researchers, developers, and application experts in a variety of disciplines, from all over the world, to present and discuss ideas on mesh generation and related topics. The technical papers in this volume present theoretical and novel ideas and algorithms with practical potential, as well as technical applications in science and engineering, geometric modelling, computer graphics, and visualization.

This book has two main objectives:
• to provide a concise introduction to nonlinear optimization methods, which can be used as a textbook at a graduate or upper undergraduate level;

This book has two main objectives:
• to provide a concise introduction to nonlinear optimization methods, which can be used as a textbook at a graduate or upper undergraduate level;

This text aims at giving you the simplest possible introduction to differential equations that are used in models of electrophysiology. It covers models at several spatial and temporal scales with associated numerical methods. The text demonstrates that a very limited number of fundamental techniques can be used to define numerical methods for equations ranging from ridiculously simple to extremely complex systems of partial differential equations. Every method is implemented in Matlab and the codes are freely available online. By using these codes, the reader becomes familiar with classical models of electrophysiology, like the cable equation, the monodomain model, and the bidomain model. But modern models that have just started to gain attention in the field of computational electrophysiology are also presented. If you just want to read one book, it should probably not be this one, but if you want a simple introduction to a complex field, it is worth considering the present text.

Proceedings of the second conference on Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing, held June 4-9, 2001 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
The main idea of the conference was to bring together applied mathematicians both from outside academia, as well as experts from other areas (engineering, applied sciences) whose work involves advanced mathematical techniques.