Some of the most active practitioners in the field of integrable systems have been asked to describe what they think of as the problems and results which seem to be most interesting and important now and are likely to influence future directions. The papers in this collection, representing their authors' responses, offer a broad panorama of the subject as it enters the 1990's.

The theory of soliton equations and integrable systems has developed rapidly during the last 30 years with numerous applications in mechanics and physics. For a long time, books in this field have not been written but the flood of papers was overwhelming: many hundreds, maybe thousands of them. All this output followed one single work by Gardner, Green, Kruskal, and Mizura on the Korteweg-de Vries equation (KdV), which had seemed to be merely an unassuming equation of mathematical physics describing waves in shallow water.Besides its obvious practical use, this theory is attractive also because it satisfies the aesthetic need in a beautiful formula which is so inherent to mathematics.The second edition is up-to-date and differs from the first one considerably. One third of the book (five chapters) is completely new and the rest is refreshed and edited.

The theory of soliton equations and integrable systems has developed rapidly during the last 20 years with numerous applications in mechanics and physics. For a long time books in this field have not been written but the flood of papers was overwhelming: many hundreds, maybe thousands of them. All this followed one single work by Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, and Miura about the Korteweg-de Vries equation (KdV) which, had seemed to be merely an unassuming equation of mathematical physics describing waves in shallow water.

Soliton theory is an important branch of applied mathematics and mathematical physics. An active and productive field of research, it has important applications in fluid mechanics, nonlinear optics, classical and quantum fields theories etc. This book presents a broad view of soliton theory. It gives an expository survey of the most basic ideas and methods, such as physical background, inverse scattering, Backlünd transformations, finite-dimensional completely integrable systems, symmetry, Kac-moody algebra, solitons and differential geometry, numerical analysis for nonlinear waves, and gravitational solitons. Besides the essential points of the theory, several applications are sketched and some recent developments, partly by the authors and their collaborators, are presented.

The theory of soliton equations and integrable systems has developed rapidly during the last 20 years with numerous applications in mechanics and physics. For a long time books in this field have not been written but the flood of papers was overwhelming: many hundreds, maybe thousands of them. All this followed one single work by Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, and Miura about the Korteweg-de Vries equation (KdV) which, had seemed to be merely an unassuming equation of mathematical physics describing waves in shallow water.This branch of science is attractive because it is one of those which revives the interest in the basic principles of mathematics, a beautiful formula.

A survey of current knowledge about Hamiltonian systems with three or more degrees of freedom and related topics. The Hamiltonian systems appearing in most of the applications are non-integrable. Hence methods to prove non-integrability results are presented and the different meaning attributed to non-integrability are discussed. For systems near an integrable one, it can be shown that, under suitable conditions, some parts of the integrable structure, most of the invariant tori, survive. Many of the papers discuss near-integrable systems. From a topological point of view, some singularities must appear in different problems, either caustics, geodesics, moving wavefronts, etc. This is also related to singularities in the projections of invariant objects, and can be used as a signature of these objects. Hyperbolic dynamics appear as a source on unpredictable behaviour and several mechanisms of hyperbolicity are presented. The destruction of tori leads to Aubrey-Mather objects, and this is touched on for a related class of systems. Examples without periodic orbits are constructed, against a classical conjecture. Other topics concern higher dimensional systems, either finite (networks and localised vibrations on them) or infinite, like the quasiperiodic Schrödinger operator or nonlinear hyperbolic PDE displaying quasiperiodic solutions. Most of the applications presented concern celestial mechanics problems, like the asteroid problem, the design of spacecraft orbits, and methods to compute periodic solutions.

With contributions by numerous experts

The book is devoted to partial differential equations of Hamiltonian form, close to integrable equations. For such equations a KAM-like theorem is proved, stating that solutions of the unperturbed equation that are quasiperiodic in time mostly persist in the perturbed one. The theorem is applied to classical nonlinear PDE's with one-dimensional space variable such as the nonlinear string and nonlinear Schr|dinger equation andshow that the equations have "regular" (=time-quasiperiodic and time-periodic) solutions in rich supply. These results cannot be obtained by other techniques. The book will thus be of interest to mathematicians and physicists working with nonlinear PDE's. An extensivesummary of the results and of related topics is provided in the Introduction. All the nontraditional material used is discussed in the firstpart of the book and in five appendices.