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In diesem Buch setzen sich renommierte Wissenschaftler wie Herbert W. Franke, Wolfgang Dahmen, Achim Bachem, Heinz-Otto Peitgen oder Frieder Nake aus der jeweils unterschiedlichen Sicht ihres Fachgebietes mit dem Thema auseinander. Erleben wir den Beginn eines visuellen Zeitalters? Technisch erzeugte Bilder prägen die alltäglichen Formen moderner Unterhaltung ebenso wie sie in Wissenschaft und Forschung zur Quelle neuer Erkenntnis werden.

The'raison d'etre'of hierarchical dustering theory stems from one basic phe­ nomenon: This is the notorious non-transitivity of similarity relations. In spite of the fact that very often two objects may be quite similar to a third without being that similar to each other, one still wants to dassify objects according to their similarity. This should be achieved by grouping them into a hierarchy of non-overlapping dusters such that any two objects in ~ne duster appear to be more related to each other than they are to objects outside this duster. In everyday life, as well as in essentially every field of scientific investigation, there is an urge to reduce complexity by recognizing and establishing reasonable das­ sification schemes. Unfortunately, this is counterbalanced by the experience of seemingly unavoidable deadlocks caused by the existence of sequences of objects, each comparatively similar to the next, but the last rather different from the first.

Phylogenetic combinatorics is a branch of discrete applied mathematics concerned with the combinatorial description and analysis of phylogenetic trees and related mathematical structures such as phylogenetic networks and tight spans. Based on a natural conceptual framework, the book focuses on the interrelationship between the principal options for encoding phylogenetic trees: split systems, quartet systems and metrics. Such encodings provide useful options for analyzing and manipulating phylogenetic trees and networks, and are at the basis of much of phylogenetic data processing. This book highlights how each one provides a unique perspective for viewing and perceiving the combinatorial structure of a phylogenetic tree and is, simultaneously, a rich source for combinatorial analysis and theory building. Graduate students and researchers in mathematics and computer science will enjoy exploring this fascinating new area and learn how mathematics may be used to help solve topical problems arising in evolutionary biology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2007, held in Xi'an, China in August 2007. The 29 revised full papers presented together with 8 invited papers and 2 invited presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 114 submissions. The papers feature original research in the areas of combinatorial optimization - both theoretical issues and and applications motivated by real-world problems thus showing convincingly the usefulness and efficiency of the algorithms discussed in a practical setting.