Hamiltonian Dynamics and Celestial Mechanics

This book contains selected papers from the AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference on Hamiltonian Systems and Celestial Mechanics held in Seattle in June 1995. The symbiotic relationship of these two topics creates a natural combination for a conference on dynamics. The topics covered include twist maps, the Aubrey-Mather theory, Arnold diffusion, qualitative and topological studies of systems, and variational methods, as well as specific topics such as Melnikov's procedure and the singularity properties of particular systems. As one of the few books that addresses both Hamiltonian systems and celestial mechanics, this volume offers emphasis on new issues and unsolved problems. Many of the papers give new results, yet the editors purposely included some exploratory papers based on numerical computations, a section on unsolved problems, and papers that pose conjectures while developing what is known. It features open research problems, and papers on central configurations.