Preface

This Special Issue contains some selected papers presented at the Third International Conference on Numerical Analysis and Optimization: Theory, Methods, Applications and Technology Transfer (NAOIII-2014), held during January 5-9, 2014, at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), Muscat, Oman. The conference was sponsored by SQU, The Research Council of Oman, The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP, Italy), AMPL (USA); and the local sponsors the German University of Technology (GUtech) in Oman, the Al-Anan Press (Oman) and Al-Roya Newspaper (Oman).The NAO conference series is held once every 3 years at SQU: the first conference (NAO-2008) was held during April 6-8, 2008, and the second conference (NAOII-2011) was held during January 3-6, 2011. The NAO conference will hopefully become a forum where prominent mathematicians, worldwide experts and active researchers gather and meet to share their knowledge on new scientific methodologies and simulate the communication of new innovative ideas, promote scientific exchange and discuss possibilities of further cooperation, networking and promotion of mobility of senior and young researchers and research students. NAOIII-2014 was inaugurated by HE Dr. Abdullah bin Mohammed Al Sarmi, the Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Higher Education, HE Dr. Ali bin Saud Al Bemani, the Vice Chancellor of SQU and HE Mrs. Paola Amadei, Ambassador of Italy to the Sultanate. Twenty world leading researchers gave keynote lectures in twelve Technical Sessions of the conference. In total, forty international participants gave contributed talks. More information is available at: http://conference.squ.edu.om/nao. Thirteen of the keynote papers were selected for the edited Springer proceedings in Mathematics and Statistics Volume 134, “Numerical Analysis and Optimization NAO-III, Muscat, Oman, January 2014”, where each paper was accepted after a stringent peer review process by independent reviewers.Eight of the conference contributed papers were selected for this Special Issue 20(2) of the SQU Journal for Science. We wish to express our gratitude to all contributors. We are also indebted to many anonymous referees for the care taken in reviewing the papers submitted for publication