Mathematical Programs with Vanishing Constraints

And out of the confusion Where the river meets the sea Something new would arrive Something better would arrive... " Acknowledgements The doctoral thesis at hand is the result of my research during the time as a Ph.D. student at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Würzburg. In a long-term project like this one, there are, of course, several ups and downs, and hence one is lucky to have a solid scientific and social environment. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to thank certain people who have helped me create this dissertation, directly or indirectly. First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor Christian Kanzow for his superb scientific guidance through the past three years. He provided me with a very interesting and challenging research project, generously sharing his time and discussing new ideas. Moreover, I could substantially benefit from his great experience in the field of mathematical optimization which guided me carefully on the path which eventually led to this thesis. In addition to that, I would like to thank him for several joint publications which, clearly, had a big impact on the material presented here. Furthermore, through him, I got to know and collaborate with a couple of prominent researchers in my field of work like, for example, Jiří V. Outrata and Wolfgang Achtziger, where the latter also deserves my appreciation for agreeing to co-referee this disserta-tion. Apart from my supervisor there are some more persons to whom I owe my gratitude since this whole project could hardly have been realized this way if it had not been for their support. At this, first, I would like to thank my colleague Florian Möller for helping me with all kinds of technical questions, very amusing discussions about strength training and, after all, for being a really nice guy. A very special thanks goes to my closest friends: Cedric Essi, Christian Struck, and Neela Struck to whom I feel deeply indebted for caring through all the lows and also sharing the highs. Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents for generous financial support during my studies and my whole family (also including my sister Imke) for unrestrained emotional backup.