60th Birthday

Bradley Walsh is one of the nation's favourite performers and, in honour of his 60th birthday, ITV is celebrating with a one-off special looking back at his career.

Jerry Marsden, one of the world’s pre-eminent mechanicians and applied mathematicians, celebrated his 60th birthday in August 2002. The event was marked by a workshop on “Geometry, Mechanics, and Dynamics”at the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences, of which he wasthefoundingDirector. Ratherthanmerelyproduceaconventionalp- ceedings, with relatively brief accounts of research and technical advances presented at the meeting, we wished to acknowledge Jerry’s in?uence as a teacher, a propagator of new ideas, and a mentor of young talent. Con- quently, starting in 1999, we sought to collect articles that might be used as entry points by students interested in ?elds that have been shaped by Jerry’s work.

This book presents a collection of research papers that address the challenge of how to develop software in a principled way that, in particular, enables reasoning. The individual papers approach this challenge from various perspectives including programming languages, program verification, and the systematic variation of software. Topics covered include programming abstractions for concurrent and distributed software, specification and verification techniques for imperative programs, and development techniques for software product lines.