---

Mathematics provides the tools and ideas to formulate real-life problems mathematically and then help in solving them. This book deals with several different problems arising from many disciplines and offers some modern mathematical approaches to handle them.

---

Real-life problems are often quite complicated in form and nature and, for centuries, many different mathematical concepts, ideas and tools have been developed to formulate these problems theoretically and then to solve them either exactly or approximately.

This book aims to gather a collection of papers dealing with several different problems arising from many disciplines and some modern mathematical approaches to handle them. In this respect, the book offers a wide overview on many of the current trends in Mathematics as valuable formal techniques in capturing and exploiting the complexity involved in real-world situations.

Several researchers, colleagues, friends and students of Professor María Luisa Menéndez have contributed to this volume to pay tribute to her and to recognize the diverse contributions she had made to the fields of Mathematics and Statistics and to the profession in general. She had a sweet and strong personality, and instilled great values and work ethics in her students through her dedication to teaching and research. Even though the academic community lost her prematurely, she would continue to provide inspiration to many students and researchers worldwide through her published work.

---

Part I Advanced Methods in Statistics.-
Part II Applied Mathematics.-
Part III Distribution Theory and Applications.-
Part IV Divergence Measures and Statistical Applications.-
Part V Modelling in Engineering Problems.-
Part VI Theory of Games.-
Part VII Model-Based Methods for Survey Sampling.-
Part VIII Probability Theory.-
Part IX Robust and Soft Methods in Statistics.-
Part X Modelling in Biological and Medical Problems.

---

N. BALAKRISHNAN, PhD, is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.V. B. NEVZOROV, PhD, DS, is Professor of Probability and Statistics at St. Petersburg State University in St. Petersburg, Russia.

---