Report on the Symposium

The IV Hotine-Marussi Symposium on Mathematical Geodesy was held in Trento from September 14th to September 17th, 1998. It continues the long-standing tradition of symposia that was initiated by Martin Hotine and Antonio Marussi in Venice in 1959. It is the 12th symposium of this series and the fourth one associated with the names of Hotine and Marussi. The arguments treated were connected with the theoretical and methodological aspects of geodesy. Infact, these kind of symposia are usually devoted to the development of the founding aspects of geodesy. The principal themes that were discussed during this last meeting have been related to the boundary value problems, to the satellite geodesy and to the stochastic methods in geodesy. The boundary value problems were tackled both from the theoretical and the numerical points of view. New advancements were presented in the Molodensky scalar boundary value problem as well as in the application of the Slepian theory for the sphere. Furthermore, a theoretical scheme for handling white noise stochastic boundary value problem was illustrated, the importance of ellipsoidal effects were investigated in inverse Stokes problem and the solution of the spheroidal Stokes problem was presented. Methods for computing the solutions of the boundary value problems were also illustrated. The boundary element formulations were introduced and numerically tested in geodetic boundary value problems; the use of Galerkins method has been proposed as a tool for solving geodetic boundary value problems as well as iterative solution applied to the scalar boundary value problem.