Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop, Château de Bonas, France, July 25--31, 1993

This text bridges the gap between the classic texts on potential theory and modern books on applied geophysics. It opens with an introduction to potential theory, emphasising those aspects particularly important to earth scientists, such as Laplace's equation, Newtonian potential, magnetic and electrostatic fields, and conduction of heat. The theory is then applied to the interpretation of gravity and magnetic anomalies, drawing on examples from modern geophysical literature. Topics explored include regional and global fields, forward modeling, inverse methods, depth-to-source estimation, ideal bodies, analytical continuation, and spectral analysis. The book includes numerous exercises and a variety of computer subroutines written in FORTRAN. Graduate students and researchers in geophysics will find this book essential.

A long-awaited, updated introductory text by the world leaders in potential theory. This essential reference work covers all aspects of this major field of mathematical research, from basic theory and exercises to more advanced topological ideas. The largely self-contained presentation makes it basically accessible to graduate students.

This self-contained text/reference provides a basic foundation for practitioners, researchers, and students interested in any of the diverse areas of multiscale (geo)potential theory. New mathematical methods are developed enabling the gravitational potential of a planetary body to be modeled using a continuous flow of observations from land or satellite devices. Harmonic wavelets methods are introduced, as well as fast computational schemes and various numerical test examples. Presented are multiscale approaches for numerous geoscientific problems, including geoidal determination, magnetic field reconstruction, deformation analysis, and density variation modelling With exercises at the end of each chapter, the book may be used as a textbook for graduate-level courses in geomathematics, applied mathematics, and geophysics. The work is also an up-to-date reference text for geoscientists, applied mathematicians, and engineers.

The ?rst six chapters of this book are revised versions of the same chapters in the author’s 1969 book, Introduction to Potential Theory. Atthetimeof the writing of that book, I had access to excellent articles,books, and lecture notes by M. Brelot. The clarity of these works made the task of collating them into a single body much easier. Unfortunately, there is not a similar collection relevant to more recent developments in potential theory. A n- comer to the subject will ?nd the journal literature to be a maze of excellent papers and papers that never should have been published as presented. In the Opinion Column of the August, 2008, issue of the Notices of the Am- ican Mathematical Society, M. Nathanson of Lehman College (CUNY) and (CUNY) Graduate Center said it best “. . . When I read a journal article, I often ?nd mistakes. Whether I can ?x them is irrelevant. The literature is unreliable. ” From time to time, someone must try to ?nd a path through the maze. In planning this book, it became apparent that a de?ciency in the 1969 book would have to be corrected to include a discussion of the Neumann problem, not only in preparation for a discussion of the oblique derivative boundary value problem but also to improve the basic part of the subject matter for the end users, engineers, physicists, etc.

Potential theory and certain aspects of probability theory are intimately related, perhaps most obviously in that the transition function determining a Markov process can be used to define the Green function of a potential theory. Thus it is possible to define and develop many potential theoretic concepts probabilistically, a procedure potential theorists observe withjaun diced eyes in view of the fact that now as in the past their subject provides the motivation for much of Markov process theory. However that may be it is clear that certain concepts in potential theory correspond closely to concepts in probability theory, specifically to concepts in martingale theory. For example, superharmonic functions correspond to supermartingales. More specifically: the Fatou type boundary limit theorems in potential theory correspond to supermartingale convergence theorems; the limit properties of monotone sequences of superharmonic functions correspond surprisingly closely to limit properties of monotone sequences of super martingales; certain positive superharmonic functions [supermartingales] are called "potentials," have associated measures in their respective theories and are subject to domination principles (inequalities) involving the supports of those measures; in each theory there is a reduction operation whose properties are the same in the two theories and these reductions induce sweeping (balayage) of the measures associated with potentials, and so on.