In this volume, Olga A. Ladyzhenskaya expands on her highly successful 1991 Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei lectures. The lectures were devoted to questions of the behaviour of trajectories for semigroups of nonlinear bounded continuous operators in a locally non-compact metric space and for solutions of abstract evolution equations. The latter contain many initial boundary value problems for dissipative partial differential equations. This work, for which Ladyzhenskaya was awarded the Russian Academy of Sciences' Kovalevskaya Prize, reflects the high calibre of her lectures; it is essential...