In the last ten to fifteen years, there have been many important developments in the theory of integrable equations. This period is marked in particular by the strong impact of soliton theory in many diverse areas of mathematics and physics: for example, algebraic geometry (the solution of the Schottky problem), group theory (the discovery of quantum groups), topology (the connection of Jones polynomials with integrable models), and quantum gravity (the connection of the KdV with matrix models). This book presents a comprehensive overview of these developments.

A good deal of the material presented in this book has been prepared by top experts in the field lecturing in January 1987 at the Winter School on Solitons in Tiruchirapalli, India. The lectures begin at an elementary level but go on to include even the most recent developments in the field. The book makes a handy introduction to the various facets of the soliton concept, and will be useful both to newcomers to the field and to researchers who are interested in developments in new branches of physics and mathematics

Wave turbulence is a state far from (thermodynamic) equilibrium. It can be observed in a stormy sea, a hot plasma, a dielectric in a powerful laser beam, in magnets exposed to strong microwave fields, etc. A distinction has to be made between fully developed turbulence and parametric turbulence. The latter is the subject of the present book.
Addressing not only the expert but also the graduate student it gives a comprehensive review covering developments both in the West and in Eastern Europe where major research into this field has been done. Special attention is paid to the Hamiltonian...

In 1979, a historical meeting took place at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kiev, USSR, where 48 American Scientists, specialists in nonlinear and turbulent processes, met for two weeks with their soviet counterparts. This meeting pro vided the unique opportunity for USA and USSR participants to directly interact personally and scientifically with each other. This interaction was of great impor not only for the individuals involved but also for the science of nonlinear tance phenomena in general. At the end of the meeting, it was agreed that this exchange should continue, and it was...

Bifurcation and Chaos presents a collection of especially written articles describing the theory and application of nonlinear dynamics to a wide variety of problems encountered in physics and engineering. Each chapter is self-contained and includes an elementary introduction, an exposition of the present state of the art, and details of recent theoretical, computational and experimental results. Included among the practical systems analysed are: hysteretic circuits, Josephson circuits, magnetic systems, railway dynamics, rotor dynamics and nonlinear dynamics of speech. This book...

Since the human organism is itself an open system, we are naturally curious about the behavior of other open systems with fluxes of matter, energy or information. Of the possible open systems, it is those endowed with many degrees of freedom and strongly deviating from equilibrium that are most challenging. A simple but very significant example of such a system is given by developed turbulence in a continuous medium, where we can discern astonishing features of universality. This two-volume monograph deals with the theory of turbulence viewed as a general physical phenomenon. In addition to...

This book can be looked upon in more ways than one. On the one hand, it describes strikingly interesting and lucid hydrodynamic experiments done in the style of the "good old days" when the physicist needed little more than a piece of string and some sealing wax. On the other hand, it demonstrates how a profound physical analogy can help to get a synoptic view on a broad range of nonlinear phenomena involving self-organization of vortical structures in planetary atmo spheres and oceans, in galaxies and in plasmas. In particular, this approach has elucidated the nature and the mechanism of...

In the last ten to fifteen years there have been many important developments in the theory of integrable equations. This period is marked in particular by the strong impact of soliton theory in many diverse areas of mathematics and physics; for example, algebraic geometry (the solution of the Schottky problem), group theory (the discovery of quantum groups), topology (the connection of Jones polynomials with integrable models), and quantum gravity (the connection of the KdV with matrix models). This is the first book to present a comprehensive overview of these developments. Numbered among...

The investigation of nonlinear wave phenomena has been one of the main direc tions of research in optics for the last few decades. Soliton concepts applied to the description of intense electromagnetic beams and ultrashort pulse propagation in various media have contributed much to this field. The notion of solitons has proved to be very useful in describing wave processes in hydrodynamics, plasma physics and condensed matter physics. Moreover, it is also of great importance in optics for ultrafast information transmission and storage, radiation propagation in resonant media, etc. In 1973,...

The idea of devoting a complete book to this topic was born at one of the Workshops on Nonlinear and Turbulent Processes in Physics taking place reg ularly in Kiev. With the exception of E. D. Siggia and N. Ercolani, all authors of this volume were participants at the third of these workshops. All of them were acquainted with each other and with each other's work. Yet it seemed to be somewhat of a discovery that all of them were and are trying to understand the same problem - the problem of integrability of dynamical systems, primarily Hamiltonian ones with an infinite number of degrees of...