V. LAKSHMIKANTHAM is Professor and Chairman in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Arlington. In addition, he is coeditor of the journal Stochastic Analysis and Applications (Marcel Dekker, Inc.), editor of Nonlinear Analysis, and a member of the editorial boards of six other journals. He is an internationally known mathematician, having published several monographs and over 150 papers in the fields of ordinary and partial differential equations, nonlinear and stochastic analysis, and abstract differential equations. Less