The volume is dedicated to Stephen Smale on the occasion of his 80th birthday.Besides his startling 1960 result of the proof of the Poincar´e conjecture for all dimensionsgreater than or equal to five, Smale?s ground breaking contributions invarious fields in Mathematics have marked the second part of the 20th century andbeyond. Stephen Smale has done pioneering work in differential topology, globalanalysis, dynamical systems, nonlinear functional analysis, numerical analysis, theoryof computation and machine learning as well as applications in the physical andbiological sciences and economics.