Among the group of physics honors students huddled in 1957 on a Colorado mountain watching Sputnik bisect the heavens, one young scientist was destined, three short years later, to become a key player in America s own top-secret spy satellite program. One of our era s most prolific mathematicians, Karl Gustafson was given just two weeks to write the first US spy satellite s software. The project would fundamentally alter America s Cold War strategy, and this autobiographical account of a remarkable academic life spent in the top flight tells this fascinating inside story for the first time.

Gustafson takes you from his early pioneering work in computing, through fascinating encounters with Nobel laureates and Fields medalists, to his current observations on mathematics, science and life. He tells of brushes with death, being struck by lightning, and the beautiful women who have been a part of his journey."

Among the group of physics honors students huddled in 1957 on a Colorado mountain watching Sputnik bisect the heavens, one young scientist was destined, three short years later, to become a key player in America s own top-secret spy satellite program. One of our era s most prolific mathematicians, Karl Gustafson was given just two weeks to write the first US spy satellite s software. The project would fundamentally alter America s Cold War strategy, and this autobiographical account of a remarkable academic life spent in the top flight tells this fascinating inside story for the first time.

Gustafson takes you from his early pioneering work in computing, through fascinating encounters with Nobel laureates and Fields medalists, to his current observations on mathematics, science and life. He tells of brushes with death, being struck by lightning, and the beautiful women who have been a part of his journey."

"Solitons and Chaos" is a response to the growing interest in systems exhibiting these two complementary manifestations of nonlinearity. The papers cover a wide range of topics but share common mathematical notions and investigation techniques. An introductory note on eight concepts of integrability has been added as a guide for the uninitiated reader. Both specialists and graduate students will find this update on the state ofthe art useful. Key points: chaos vs. integrability; solitons: theory and applications; dissipative systems; Hamiltonian systems; maps and cascades; direct vs. inverse methods; higher dimensions; Lie groups, Painleve analysis, numerical algorithms; pertubation methods.

Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine writes in his preface: "Irreversibility is a challenge to mathematics...[which] leads to generalized functions and to an extension of spectral analysis beyond the conventional Hilbert space theory." Meeting this challenge required new mathematical formulations-obstacles met and largely overcome thanks primarily to the contributors to this volume." This compilation of works grew out of material presented at the "Hyperfunctions, Operator Theory and Dynamical Systems" symposium at the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry in 1997. The result is a coherently organized collective work that moves from general, widely applicable mathematical methods to ever more specialized physical applications. Presented in two sections, part one describes Generalized Functions and Operator Theory, part two addresses Operator Theory and Dynamical Systems. The interplay between mathematics and physics is now more necessary than ever-and more difficult than ever, given the increasing complexity of theories and methods. Here the topics include: