SIDE III

Book excerpt: This volume contains the proceedings of the third meeting on ``Symmetries and Integrability of Difference Equations'' (SIDE III). The collection includes original results not published elsewhere and articles that give a rigorous but concise overview of their subject, and provides a complete description of the state of the art. Research in the field of difference equations--often referred to more generally as discrete systems--has undergone impressive development in recent years. In this collection the reader finds the most important new developments in a number of areas, including: Lie-type symmetries of differential-difference and difference-difference equations, integrability of fully discrete systems such as cellular automata, the connection between integrability and discrete geometry, the isomonodromy approach to discrete spectral problems and related discrete Painleve equations, difference and q-difference equations and orthogonal polynomials, difference equations and quantum groups, and integrability and chaos in discrete-time dynamical systems. The proceedings will be valuable to mathematicians and theoretical physicists interested in the mathematical aspects and/or in the physical applications of discrete nonlinear dynamics, with special emphasis on the systems that can be integrated by analytic methods or at least admit special explicit solutions. The research in this volume will also be of interest to engineers working in discrete dynamics as well as to theoretical biologists and economists.