Applications of analytic and geometric methods to nonlinear differential equations

Peter A. Clarkson

In the study of integrable systems, two different approaches in particular have attracted considerable attention during the past twenty years. (1) The inverse scattering transform (IST), using complex function theory, which has been employed to solve many physically significant equations, the `soliton' equations. (2) Twistor theory, using differential geometry, which has been used to solve the self-dual Yang--Mills (SDYM) equations, a four-dimensional system having important applications in mathematical physics. Both soliton and the SDYM equations have rich algebraic structures which have been extensively studied. Recently, it has been conjectured that, in some sense, all soliton equations arise as special cases of the SDYM equations; subsequently many have been discovered as either exact or asymptotic reductions of the SDYM equations. Consequently what seems to be emerging is that a...