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Acknowledgements:

We are very grateful for the continuous support and encouragement by our
students, colleagues, and friends. During the course of preparing this book we
have benefitted from countless discussions with so many excellent individuals
including Martin Costabel, Gabriel Gatica, Olaf Steinbach, Ernst Stephan
and the late Siegfried Pr¨ossdorf; to name a few. Moreover, we are indebted
to our reviewers of the first draft of the book manuscript for their critical
reviews and helpful suggestions which helped us to improve our presentation.
We would like to extend our thanks to Greg Silber, Clemens F¨orster and
G¨ulnihal Meral for careful and critical proof reading of the manuscript.
We take this opportunity to acknowledge our gratitude to our universi-
ties, the University of Delaware at Newark, DE. U.S.A. and the University
of Stuttgart in Germany; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Ful-
bright Foundation, and the German Research Foundation DFG for repeated
support within the Priority Research Program on Boundary Element Meth-
ods and within the Collaborative Research Center on Multifield Problems,
SFB 404 at the University of Stuttgart, the MURI program of AFOSR at
the University of Delaware, and the Neˇcas Center in Prague. We express in
particular our gratitude to the Oberwolfach Research Institute in Germany
which supported us three times through the Research in Pairs Program, where
we enjoyed the excellent research environment and atmosphere. It is also a
pleasure to acknowledge the generous attitude, the unfailing courtesy, and
the ready cooperation of the publisher.
Last, but by no means least, we are gratefully indebted to Gisela Wend-
land for her highly skilled hands in the LT X typing and preparation of this
A
E
manuscript.
Newark, Delaware George C. Hsiao
Stuttgart, Germany, 2008 Wolfgang L. Wendland