Five decades as a mathematician and educator : on the 80th birthday of Professor Yung-Chow Wong

The book may be viewed as an introduction to time-hadronic waves in dissipative bodies, notably viscoelastic solids and fluids. The inhomogeneity of the waves, which is due to the fact that planes of constant phase are not parallel to planes of constant amplitude, is shown to be strictly related to the dissipativity of the medium. A preliminary analysis is performed of the propagation of inhomogeneous waves in unbounded media and of reflection and refraction at plane interfaces. Then emphasis is given to those features that are of significance for applications. In essence, they regard surface waves, scattering by (curved) obstacles, wave propagation in layered heterogeneous media, ray methods. The pertinent mathematical techniques are discussed so as to make the book reasonably self-contained My Early Life, 1913-1948 / Yung-Chow Wong -- On the Eigenvalues and Numerical Range of a Quaternionic Matrix / Yik-Hoi Au-Yeung -- Monopoles as Fibre Bundles and Strings as Infinite Rank Tensors / Hong-Mo Chan and Sheung Tsun Tsou -- Approximation by Affine Functions / Jor-Ting Chan -- A Review on Optimal Design for Mixture Models / Ling-Yau Chan -- Griffiths' Formalism on the Calculus of Variations via Exterior Differential Systems / Wing-Sum Cheung -- Change of Measures, Likelihood Ratio Martingales and Some Applications / Tze Leung Lai -- Beyond the Impossibility of a 16-Square Identity / Kee Yuen Lam and Paul Yiu -- Lie Group Homomorphisms which Induce Isomorphisms of Representation Rings / S. P. Lam -- A Lifting Theorem, and Rings with Isomorphic Matrix Rings / T. Y. Lam -- On Ternary Equations in Square-Free and Prime Variables / Yau-Luen Lau, Man-Cheung Leung and Ming-Chit Liu -- Instantons and Three-Manifolds / Ronnie Lee