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.

The concept of phase space plays a decisive role in the study of the transition from classical to quantum physics. This is particularly the case in areas such as nonlinear dynamics and chaos, geometric quantization and the study of the various semi-classical theories, which are the setting of the present volume. Much of the content is devoted to the study of the Wigner distribution. This volume gives the first complete survey of the progress made by both mathematicians and physicists. It will serve as an excellent reference for further research.