The NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Painleve Transcendents, their Asymp- totics and Physical Applications," held at the Alpine Inn in Sainte-Adele, near Montreal, September 2 -7, 1990, brought together a group of experts to discuss the topic and produce this volume. There were 41 participants from 14 countries and 27 lectures were presented, all included in this volume. The speakers presented reviews of topics to which they themselves have made important contributions and also re- sults of new original research. The result is a volume which, though multiauthored, has the character of a...

The NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Painleve Transcendents, their Asymp- totics and Physical Applications," held at the Alpine Inn in Sainte-Adele, near Montreal, September 2 -7, 1990, brought together a group of experts to discuss the topic and produce this volume. There were 41 participants from 14 countries and 27 lectures were presented, all included in this volume. The speakers presented reviews of topics to which they themselves have made important contributions and also re- sults of new original research. The result is a volume which, though multiauthored, has the character of a...

This book shows how Lie group and integrability techniques, originally developed for differential equations, have been adapted to the case of difference equations. Difference equations are playing an increasingly important role in the natural sciences. Indeed, many phenomena are inherently discrete and thus naturally described by difference equations.

More fundamentally, in subatomic physics, space-time may actually be discrete. Differential equations would then just be approximations of more basic discrete ones. Moreover, when using differential equations to analyze continuous...