I declare herewith statutorily that the present dissertation was carried out under the international ethical and academical rules and under the protection of intellectual property. According to these rules, I avoided plagiarism of any kind and I made reference to any source which I used in this thesis.To my teacher Apostolos Beligiannis and to my wife Ioanna Katrakazou
AcknowledgementFirst and foremost I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Apostolos Beligiannis for being a real teacher for me over the last eight years -and not only in mathematics. He has always encouraged and helped me very generously. His guidance was invaluable for learning several different topics in algebra and generally in mathematics. During my PhD I remember several moments of uncertainty. Apostolos Beligiannis was always there helping me with his deep knowledge. I want to thank him for sharing and discussing with me, so kindly, his powerful ideas, his inspiration and his insight. It was a great honor for me to be his student, and without him this thesis would have never been completed.I am also very grateful to Nikolaos Marmaridis and Apostolos Thoma for being the interior members of the evaluation committee and for supporting me strongly over all these years. Further, I would like to thank the other members of the committee: Olympia Talelli and Ioannis Emmanouil from the University of Athens, and Hara Charalambous and Athanassios Papistas from the University of Thessaloniki, for their useful comments and interesting questions.During my PhD I spent a few months in Bielefeld, as well as in Trondheim and in Stuttgart. It is a great pleasure to thank Henning Krause, Øyvind Solberg and Steffen Koenig for the warm hospitality and the excellent working conditions. I would also like to thank several members of their groups for providing a very friendly environment and for useful discussions. Moreover, I want to acknowledge Edward L. Green and Jorge Vitória for the fruitful collaborations and the enjoyable discussions we had.My sincere thanks to Andreas Savas-Halilaj for his continuous encouragement through our everyday conversations and to Ioannis Giannoulis for his big support and advice during the last two years. Moreover, I want to thank Christos Tatakis, my office mate for almost six years, for helping me always in difficult circumstances. Special thanks to Magdalini Lada for her support and for the generous hospitality (with Øyvind) during my visits in Trondheim. I would also like to thank George Vafiadis for his help with L A T E X. Further, I want to mention several friends that helped me a lot all these years: