Many problems in science, technology and engineering are posed in the form of operator equations of the first kind, with the operator and RHS approximately known. But such problems often turn out to be ill-posed, having no solution, or a non-unique solution, and/or an unstable solution. Non-existence and non-uniqueness can usually be overcome by settling for generalised' solutions, leading to the need to develop regularising algorithms.
The theory of ill-posed problems has advanced greatly since A. N. Tikhonov laid its foundations, the Russian original of this book (1990) rapidly...