Volume III of the Collected Works of V.I. Arnold contains papers written in the years 1972 to 1979. The main theme emerging in Arnold's work of this period is the development of singularity theory of smooth functions and mappings. The volume also contains papers by V.I. Arnold on catastrophe theory and on A.N. Kolmogorov's school, his prefaces to Russian editions of several books related to singularity theory, V. Arnold's lectures on bifurcations of discrete dynamical systems, as well as a review by V.I. Arnold and Ya.B. Zeldovich of V.V. Beletsky's book on celestial mechanics. Vladimir Arnold was one of the great mathematical scientists of our time. He is famous for both the breadth and the depth of his work. At the same time he is one of the most prolific and outstanding mathematical authors.

Volume III of the Collected Works of V.I. Arnold contains papers written in the years 1972 to 1979. The main theme emerging in Arnold's work of this period is the development of singularity theory of smooth functions and mappings. The volume also contains papers by V.I. Arnold on catastrophe theory and on A.N. Kolmogorov's school, his prefaces to Russian editions of several books related to singularity theory, V. Arnold's lectures on bifurcations of discrete dynamical systems, as well as a review by V.I. Arnold and Ya.B. Zeldovich of V.V. Beletsky's book on celestial mechanics. Vladimir Arnold was one of the great mathematical scientists of our time. He is famous for both the breadth and the depth of his work. At the same time he is one of the most prolific and outstanding mathematical authors.

This book is devoted to the phenomenon of quasi-periodic motion in dynamical systems. Such a motion in the phase space densely fills up an invariant torus. This phenomenon is most familiar from Hamiltonian dynamics. Hamiltonian systems are well known for their use in modelling the dynamics related to frictionless mechanics, including the planetary and lunar motions. In this context the general picture appears to be as follows. On the one hand, Hamiltonian systems occur that are in complete order: these are the integrable systems where all motion is confined to invariant tori. On the other hand, systems exist that are entirely chaotic on each energy level. In between we know systems that, being sufficiently small perturbations of integrable ones, exhibit coexistence of order (invariant tori carrying quasi-periodic dynamics) and chaos (the so called stochastic layers). The Kolmogorov-Arnol'd-Moser (KAM) theory on quasi-periodic motions tells us that the occurrence of such motions is open within the class of all Hamiltonian systems: in other words, it is a phenomenon persistent under small Hamiltonian perturbations. Moreover, generally, for any such system the union of quasi-periodic tori in the phase space is a nowhere dense set of positive Lebesgue measure, a so called Cantor family. This fact implies that open classes of Hamiltonian systems exist that are not ergodic. The main aim of the book is to study the changes in this picture when other classes of systems - or contexts - are considered.

This volume 6 of the Collected Works comprises 27 papers by V.I.Arnold, one of the most outstanding mathematicians of all times, written in 1991 to 1995. During this period Arnold's interests covered Vassiliev's theory of invariants and knots, invariants and bifurcations of plane curves, combinatorics of Bernoulli, Euler and Springer numbers, geometry of wave fronts, the Berry phase and quantum Hall effect. The articles include a list of problems in dynamical systems, a discussion of the problem of (in)solvability of equations, papers on symplectic geometry of caustics and contact geometry of wave fronts, comments on problems of A.D.Sakharov, as well as a rather unusual paper on projective topology. The interested reader will certainly enjoy Arnold's 1994 paper on mathematical problems in physics with the opening by-now famous phrase "Mathematics is the name for those domains of theoretical physics that are temporarily unfashionable." The book will be of interest to the wide audience from college students to professionals in mathematics or physics and in the history of science. The volume also includes translations of two interviews given by Arnold to the French and Spanish media. One can see how worried he was about the fate of Russian and world mathematics and science in general.