We present a survey of research results obtained for infra-nilmanifolds, their fundamental groups and some of their generalizations. This is presented from two different approaches and covers achievements obtained during the past four decades and showing a remarkable amount of mathematical interdisciplinarity. We go more in depth concerning the existence and construction of polynomial structures for these manifolds and groups, a direction where significant progress was made in the past few years. The bounded-degree polynomial structures developed by the authors triggered a number of challenging open problems. Also, their study already has lead to some interesting results concerning e.g. Anosov diffeomorphisms and expanding maps.

Let V be any valuation domain and let E be a subset of the quotient field K of V. We study the ring of integer-valued polynomials on E, that is, Int(E, V)={f$\in$K[X]｜f(E)⊆V}. We show that, if E is precompact, then Int(E, V) has many properties similar to those of the classical ring Int(Z).In particular, Int(E, V) is dense in the ring of continuous functions C(E, V); each finitely generated ideal of Int(E, V) may be generated by two elements; and finally, Int(E, V) is a Prufer domain.

This paper is a natural continuation of [2], [3], [4] and [5]. Localization techniques for modular lattices are developed. These techniques are applied to study liftings of linear order types from quotient lattices and to find Г-dense sets in certain lattices without Г-deviation in the sense of [4], where Г is a set of indecomposable linear order types.

Two compact Riemannian manifolds are said to be isospectral if the associated Laplace-Beltrami operators have the same eigenvalue spectrum. We describe a method, based on the used of Riemannian submersions, for constructing isospectral manifolds with different local geometry and survey examples constructed through this method.

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Some discrimination of modules whose endomorhism rings are prime is introduced, by means of structures of submodules inducing prime ideals of the endomorphism ring End(sub)R (M) of a left R-module (sub)RM over a ring R. Modules with non-prime endomorphism rings are contrapositively studied as well.

The paper studies the evolution of the financial markets and pays the basic attention to the role of financial innovations (derivative securities) in this process. A characterization of both complete and incomplete markets is given through an identification of the sets of contingent claims and terminal wealths of self-financing portfolios. the dynamics of the financial system is described as a movement of incomplete markets to a complete one when the volume of financial innovations is growing up and the spread tends to zero (the Merton financial innovation spiral). Namely in this context the paper deals with the problem of pricing risks in both field: finance and insurance.

The classical Geometric Brownian motion (GBM) model for the price of a risky asset, from which the huge financial derivatives industry has developed, stipulates that the log returns are iid Gaussian. however, typical log returns data show a distribution with much higher peaks and heavier tails than the Gaussian as well as evidence of strong and persistent dependence. In this paper we describe a simple replacement for GBM, a fractal activity time Geometric Brownian motion (FATGBM) model based on fractal activity time which readily explains these observed features in the data. Consequences of the model are explained, and examples are given to illustrate how the self-similar scaling properties of the activity time check out in practice.

We write down explicity a recursive formula of one-pointed gravitational Gromov-Witten invariants and reduce the computation of them to a combinatoric problem which is not solved yet. The one-pointed invariants were played important role in Givental’s program in mirror symmetry. In section 3, we describe the combinatoric problem which can be read independently.

Regular maps and hypermaps are cellular decompositions of closed surfaces exhibiting the highest possible number of symmetries. The five Platonic solids present the most familar examples of regular maps. The gret dodecahedron, a 5-valent pentagonal regular map on the surface of genus 5 discovered by Kepler, is probably the first known non-spherical regular map. Modern history of regular maps goes back at least to Klein (1878) who described in [59] a regular map of type (3, 7) on the orientable surface of genus 3. In its early times, the study of regular maps was closely connected with group theory as one can see in Burnside’s famous monograph [19], and more recently in Coxeter’s and Moser’s book [25] (Chapter 8). The present-time interest in regular maps extends to their connection to Dyck\`s triangle groups, Riemann surfaces, algebraic curves, Galois groups and other areas, Many of these links are nicely surveyed in the recent papers of Jones [55] and Jones and Singerman [54]. The presented survey paper is based on the talk given by the author at the conference “Mathematics in the New Millenium”held in Seoul, October 2000. The idea was, on one hand side, to show the relationship of (regular) maps and hypermaps to the above mentioned fields of mathematics. On the other hand, we wanted to stress some ideas and results that are important for understanding of the nature of these interesting mathematical objects.