The original idea of the organizers of the Washington Symposium was to span a fairly narrow range of topics on some recent techniques developed for the investigation of nonlinear partial differential equations and discuss these in a forum of experts. It soon became clear, however, that the dynamical systems approach interfaced significantly with many important branches of applied mathematics. As a consequence, the scope of this resulting proceedings volume is an enlarged one with coverage of a wider range of research topics.

First published 1992; Re-issued 2008; Reprinted with Introduction 2022.

The original idea of the organizers of the Washington Symposium was to span a fairly narrow range of topics on some recent techniques developed for the investigation of nonlinear partial differential equations and discuss these in a forum of experts. It soon became clear, however, that the dynamical systems approach interfaced significantly with many important branches of applied mathematics. As a consequence, the scope of this resulting proceedings volume is an enlarged one with coverage of a wider range of research topics.

This volume contains lectures and invited papers from the Focus Program on "Nonlinear Dispersive Partial Differential Equations and Inverse Scattering" held at the Fields Institute from July 31-August 18, 2017. The conference brought together researchers in completely integrable systems and PDE with the goal of advancing the understanding of qualitative and long-time behavior in dispersive nonlinear equations. The program included Percy Deift’s Coxeter lectures, which appear in this volume together with tutorial lectures given during the first week of the focus program. The research papers collected here include new results on the focusing ​nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation, the massive Thirring model, and the Benjamin-Bona-Mahoney equation as dispersive PDE in one space dimension, as well as the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili II equation, the Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation, and the Gross-Pitaevskii equation as dispersive PDE in two space dimensions. The Focus Program coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery by Gardner, Greene, Kruskal and Miura that the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation could be integrated by exploiting a remarkable connection between KdV and the spectral theory of Schrodinger's equation in one space dimension. This led to the discovery of a number of completely integrable models of dispersive wave propagation, including the cubic NLS equation, and the derivative NLS equation in one space dimension and the Davey-Stewartson, Kadomtsev-Petviashvili and Novikov-Veselov equations in two space dimensions. These models have been extensively studied and, in some cases, the inverse scattering theory has been put on rigorous footing. It has been used as a powerful analytical tool to study global well-posedness and elucidate asymptotic behavior of the solutions, including dispersion, soliton resolution, and semiclassical limits.

One of the major problems in the study of evolution equations of mathematical physics is the investigation of the behavior of the solutions to these equations when time is large or tends to infinity. The related important questions concern the stability of solutions or the character of the instability if a solution is unstable. In the last few decades, considerable progress in this area has been achieved in the study of autonomous evolution partial differential equations. For anumber of basic evolution equations of mathematical physics, it was shown that the long time behavior of their solutions can be characterized by a very important notion of a global attractor of the equation. In this book, the authors study new problems related to the theory of infinite-dimensionaldynamical systems that were intensively developed during the last 20 years. They construct the attractors and study their properties for various non-autonomous equations of mathematical physics: the 2D and 3D Navier-Stokes systems, reaction-diffusion systems, dissipative wave equations, the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, and others. Since, as it is shown, the attractors usually have infinite dimension, the research is focused on the Kolmogorov $\varepsilon$-entropy of attractors. Upperestimates for the $\varepsilon$-entropy of uniform attractors of non-autonomous equations in terms of $\varepsilon$-entropy of time-dependent coefficients are proved. Also, the authors construct attractors for those equations of mathematical physics for which the solution of the corresponding Cauchyproblem is not unique or the uniqueness is not proved. The theory of the trajectory attractors for these equations is developed, which is later used to construct global attractors for equations without uniqueness. The method of trajectory attractors is applied to the study of finite-dimensional approximations of attractors. The perturbation theory for trajectory and global attractors is developed and used in the study of the attractors of equations with terms rapidly oscillating with respect tospatial and time variables. It is shown that the attractors of these equations are contained in a thin neighborhood of the attractor of the averaged equation. The book gives systematic treatment to the theory of attractors of autonomous and non-autonomous evolution equations of mathematical physics.It can be used both by specialists and by those who want to get acquainted with this rapidly growing and important area of mathematics.

The Second Silivri Workshop functioned as a short summer school and a working conference, producing lecture notes and research papers on recent developments of Stochastic Analysis on Wiener space. The topics of the lectures concern short time asymptotic problems and anticipative stochastic differential equations. Research papers are mostly extensions and applications of the techniques of anticipative stochastic calculus.