The aim of this book is to give a self-contained introduction to the mathe matical analysis and physical explanations of some basic nonlinear wave phe nomena. This volume grew out of lecture notes for graduate courf; es which I gave at the University of Alberta, the University of Saskatchewan, .and Texas A&M University. As an introduction it is not intended to be exhaustive iQ its choice of material, but rather to convey to interested readers a basic; yet practical, methodology as well as some of the more important results obtained since the 1950's. Although the primary purpose of this volume...

This volume presents a carefully written introduction to nonlinear waves in the natural sciences and engineering. It contains many classical results as well as more recent results, dealing with topics such as the forced Korteweg--de Vries equation and material relating to X-ray crystallography. The volume contains nine chapters. Chapter 1 concerns asymptotics and nonlinear ordinary differential equations. Conservation laws are discussed in Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 considers water waves. The scattering and inverse scattering method is described in Chapter 4, which also contains a full...