User:DVD206/Summary

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The main object of study of this book is the relationship between local and global properties of two-dimensional manifolds (surfaces) and embedded graphs. The dimension of the unknown parameter fits the dimension of the data of the measurements in several important instances of the inverse problems. Also, two-dimensional setting has an additional structure, due to the duality between harmonic functions on embedded graphs and manifolds and the connection to special matrices. The context of the inverse problems provides a unified point of view on the work of many great mathematicians. Some of the problems simplify significantly in the graph theoretical setting, but their solutions nevertheless convey the main ideas of the solutions for their continuous analogs. These are some of the main motivations for writing this book. Even though there are references to many fields of mathematics in this book, it is practically self-contained, and is intended for the use by a wide audience of people interested in the subject.