Ludwig Faddeev – författare

On April 29, 1814 Napoleon landed on the island of Elba, surrounded with a personal army of 1200 men. The allies, Russia, Prussia, England and Austria, hadforcedhimintoexileafteranumberofverycostlydefeats;hewasdeprived ofallhistitles,butcouldkeepthetitleof"EmperorofElba". Historytellsusthat each morning he took long walks in the sun, reviewed his army each midday anddiscussedworldmatterswithnewlyappointedadvisors,followingthesame pattern everyday, to the great surprise of Campbell, the British of?cer who was to keep an eye on him. All this made everyone believe he was settled there for good. Napoleononcesaid:Elbaisbeautiful,butabitsmall. Elbawasde?nitely a source of inspiration; indeed, the early morning, March 6, 1815, Metternich, the chancellor of Austria was woken up by one of his aides with the stunning news that Napoleon had left Elba with his 1200 men and was marching to Paris with little resistance; A few days later he took up his throne again in the Tuileries. In spite of his insatiable hunger for battles and expansion, he is remembered as an important statesman.He was a pioneer in setting up much of the legal, administrative and political machinery in large parts of continental Europe. We gathered here in a lovely and quaint ?shing port, Marciana Marina on theislandofElba,tocelebrateoneofthepioneersofintegrablesystems,Hirota Sensei,andthisattheoccasionofhisseventiethbirthday. Trainedasaphysicist in his home university Kyushu University, Professor Hirota earned his PhD in '61 at Northwestern University with Professor Siegert in the ?eld of "Quantum Statistical mechanics". He wrote a widely appreciated Doctoral dissertation on "FunctionalIntegralrepresentationofthegrandpartitionfunction".

On April 29, 1814 Napoleon landed on the island of Elba, surrounded with a personal army of 1200 men. The allies, Russia, Prussia, England and Austria, hadforcedhimintoexileafteranumberofverycostlydefeats;hewasdeprived ofallhistitles,butcouldkeepthetitleof"EmperorofElba". Historytellsusthat each morning he took long walks in the sun, reviewed his army each midday anddiscussedworldmatterswithnewlyappointedadvisors,followingthesame pattern everyday, to the great surprise of Campbell, the British of?cer who was to keep an eye on him. All this made everyone believe he was settled there for good. Napoleononcesaid:Elbaisbeautiful,butabitsmall. Elbawasde?nitely a source of inspiration; indeed, the early morning, March 6, 1815, Metternich, the chancellor of Austria was woken up by one of his aides with the stunning news that Napoleon had left Elba with his 1200 men and was marching to Paris with little resistance; A few days later he took up his throne again in the Tuileries. In spite of his insatiable hunger for battles and expansion, he is remembered as an important statesman.He was a pioneer in setting up much of the legal, administrative and political machinery in large parts of continental Europe. We gathered here in a lovely and quaint ?shing port, Marciana Marina on theislandofElba,tocelebrateoneofthepioneersofintegrablesystems,Hirota Sensei,andthisattheoccasionofhisseventiethbirthday. Trainedasaphysicist in his home university Kyushu University, Professor Hirota earned his PhD in '61 at Northwestern University with Professor Siegert in the ?eld of "Quantum Statistical mechanics". He wrote a widely appreciated Doctoral dissertation on "FunctionalIntegralrepresentationofthegrandpartitionfunction".

This book presents the foundations of the inverse scattering method and its applications to the theory of solitons in such a form as we understand it in Leningrad. The concept of solitonwas introduced by Kruskal and Zabusky in 1965. A soliton (a solitary wave) is a localized particle-like solution of a nonlinear equation which describes excitations of finite energy and exhibits several characteristic features: propagation does not destroy the profile of a solitary wave; the interaction of several solitary waves amounts to their elastic scat­ tering, so that their total number and shape are preserved. Occasionally, the concept of the soliton is treated in a more general sense as a localized solu­ tion of finite energy. At present this concept is widely spread due to its universality and the abundance of applications in the analysis of various processes in nonlinear media. The inverse scattering method which is the mathematical basis of soliton theory has developed into a powerful tool of mathematical physics for studying nonlinear partial differential equations, almost as vigoraus as the Fourier transform. The book is based on the Hamiltonian interpretation of the method, hence the title. Methods of differential geometry and Hamiltonian formal­ ism in particular are very popular in modern mathematical physics. It is precisely the general Hamiltonian formalism that presents the inverse scat­ tering method in its most elegant form. Moreover, the Hamiltonian formal­ ism provides a link between classical and quantum mechanics.