Advances in Dynamic Equations on Time Scales

The development of time scales is still in its infancy, yet as inroads are made, interest is gathering steam. Of a great deal of interest are methods being intro­ duced for dynamic equations on time scales, which now explain some discrepancies that have been encountered when results for differential equations and their dis­ crete counterparts have been independently considered. The explanations of these seeming discrepancies are incidentally producing unifying results via time scales methods. The study of dynamic equations on time scales is a fairly new subject, and research in this area is rapidly growing. It has been created in order to unify continuous and discrete analysis, and it allows a simultaneous treatment of dif­ ferential and difference equations, extending those theories to so-called dynamic equations. An introduction to this subject is given in Dynamic Equations on Time Scales: An Introduction with Applications (MARTIN BOHNER and ALLAN PETER­ SON, Birkhauser, 2001 [86]). The current book is designed to supplement this introduction and to offer access to the vast literature that has already emerged in this field. It consists of ten chapters, written by an international team of 21 experts in their areas, thus providing an overview of the recent advances in the theory on time scales. We want to emphasize here that this book is not just a collection of papers by different authors.