9224304 Caviness This award supports the participation of eleven U.S. mathematicians and computer scientists (including seven graduate students) in a small symposium about computer algebra to be held near Linz, Austria, in October, 1993. The meeting is co-organized by Professors Bobby F. Caviness of the University of Delaware, Jeremy Johnson of Drexel University and Bruno Buchberger of the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation (RISC) at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. Though established only a few years ago, RISC has become a major center in areas of mathematics and computer science relevant to a process known as cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD). The symposium will bring together many leading researchers from Europe and the U.S. for the first time to review and synthesize current knowledge about (CAD). There will be a one-day tutorial workshop in advance of the symposium to introduce the fundamentals to the non-expert participants (principally U.S. and Austrian graduate students and recent PhD's.) Proceedings will be published in a forthcoming RISC series on symbolic computation that will be published by Springer-Verlag. Cylindrical algebraic decomposition is a process devised to obtain an improved quantifier elimination method for the theory of elementary algebra and geometry. Many important mathematical problems can be stated in this theory and solved through quantifier elimination. CAD is therefore a major breakthrough in automating mathematics and it has important applications in many recent technologies (e.g., robot motion.) As part of the broader field of symbolic computation, requiring extensive training in both computer systems and formal mathematics, it opens some of the most promising directions for future software development. ***
