When Clyde Eddy first saw the Colorado River in 1919, he vowed that he would someday travel its length. Eight years later, Eddy recruited a handful of college students to serve as crewmen and loaded them, a hobo, a mongrel dog, a bear cub, and a heavy motion picture camera into three mahogany boats and left Green River, Utah, headed for Needles, California. Forty-two days and eight hundred miles later, they were the first to successfully navigate the river during its annual high water period. This book is the original narrative of that foolhardy and thrilling adventure.

This volume contains lectures and invited papers from the Focus Program on "Nonlinear Dispersive Partial Differential Equations and Inverse Scattering" held at the Fields Institute from July 31-August 18, 2017. The conference brought together researchers in completely integrable systems and PDE with the goal of advancing the understanding of qualitative and long-time behavior in dispersive nonlinear equations. The program included Percy Deift's Coxeter lectures, which appear in this volume together with tutorial lectures given during the first week of the focus program. The research papers collected here include new results on the focusing nonlinear Schroedinger (NLS) equation, the massive Thirring model, and the Benjamin-Bona-Mahoney equation as dispersive PDE in one space dimension, as well as the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili II equation, the Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation, and the Gross-Pitaevskii equation as dispersive PDE in two space dimensions. The Focus Program coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery by Gardner, Greene, Kruskal and Miura that the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation could be integrated by exploiting a remarkable connection between KdV and the spectral theory of Schrodinger's equation in one space dimension. This led to the discovery of a number of completely integrable models of dispersive wave propagation, including the cubic NLS equation, and the derivative NLS equation in one space dimension and the Davey-Stewartson, Kadomtsev-Petviashvili and Novikov-Veselov equations in two space dimensions. These models have been extensively studied and, in some cases, the inverse scattering theory has been put on rigorous footing. It has been used as a powerful analytical tool to study global well-posedness and elucidate asymptotic behavior of the solutions, including dispersion, soliton resolution, and semiclassical limits.

This volume contains lectures and invited papers from the Focus Program on "Nonlinear Dispersive Partial Differential Equations and Inverse Scattering" held at the Fields Institute from July 31-August 18, 2017. The conference brought together researchers in completely integrable systems and PDE with the goal of advancing the understanding of qualitative and long-time behavior in dispersive nonlinear equations. The program included Percy Deift's Coxeter lectures, which appear in this volume together with tutorial lectures given during the first week of the focus program. The research papers collected here include new results on the focusing nonlinear Schroedinger (NLS) equation, the massive Thirring model, and the Benjamin-Bona-Mahoney equation as dispersive PDE in one space dimension, as well as the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili II equation, the Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation, and the Gross-Pitaevskii equation as dispersive PDE in two space dimensions. The Focus Program coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery by Gardner, Greene, Kruskal and Miura that the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation could be integrated by exploiting a remarkable connection between KdV and the spectral theory of Schrodinger's equation in one space dimension. This led to the discovery of a number of completely integrable models of dispersive wave propagation, including the cubic NLS equation, and the derivative NLS equation in one space dimension and the Davey-Stewartson, Kadomtsev-Petviashvili and Novikov-Veselov equations in two space dimensions. These models have been extensively studied and, in some cases, the inverse scattering theory has been put on rigorous footing. It has been used as a powerful analytical tool to study global well-posedness and elucidate asymptotic behavior of the solutions, including dispersion, soliton resolution, and semiclassical limits.

This book is a survey of asymptotic methods set in the current applied research context of wave propagation. It stresses rigorous analysis in addition to formal manipulations. Asymptotic expansions developed in the text are justified rigorously, and students are shown how to obtain solid error estimates for asymptotic formulae. The book relates examples and exercises to subjects of current research interest, such as the problem of locating the zeros of Taylor polynomials of entire nonvanishing functions and the problem of counting integer lattice points in subsets of the plane with various geometrical properties of the boundary.The book is intended for a beginning graduate course on asymptotic analysis in applied mathematics and is aimed at students of pure and applied mathematics as well as science and engineering. The basic prerequisite is a background in differential equations, linear algebra, advanced calculus, and complex variables at the level of introductory undergraduate courses on these subjects. The book is ideally suited to the needs of a graduate student who, on the one hand, wants to learn basic applied mathematics, and on the other, wants to understand what is needed to make the various arguments rigorous. Down here in the Village, this is known as the Courant point of view!! - Percy Deift, Courant Institute, New York.Peter D. Miller is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He earned a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Arizona and has held positions at the Australian National University (Canberra) and Monash University (Melbourne). His current research interests lie in singular limits for integrable systems.

This book describes the theory and applications of discrete orthogonal polynomials--polynomials that are orthogonal on a finite set. Unlike other books, "Discrete Orthogonal Polynomials" addresses completely general weight functions and presents a new methodology for handling the discrete weights case.

J. Baik, T. Kriecherbauer, K. T.-R. McLaughlin & P. D. Miller focus on asymptotic aspects of general, nonclassical discrete orthogonal polynomials and set out applications of current interest. Topics covered include the probability theory of discrete orthogonal polynomial ensembles and the continuum limit of the Toda lattice. The primary concern throughout is the asymptotic behavior of discrete orthogonal polynomials for general, nonclassical measures, in the joint limit where the degree increases as some fraction of the total number of points of collocation. The book formulates the orthogonality conditions defining these polynomials as a kind of Riemann-Hilbert problem and then generalizes the steepest descent method for such a problem to carry out the necessary asymptotic analysis.

This book represents the first asymptotic analysis, via completely integrable techniques, of the initial value problem for the focusing nonlinear Schrodinger equation in the semiclassical asymptotic regime. This problem is a key model in nonlinear optical physics and has increasingly important applications in the telecommunications industry. The authors exploit complete integrability to establish pointwise asymptotics for this problem's solution in the semiclassical regime and explicit integration for the underlying nonlinear, elliptic, partial differential equations suspected of governing the semiclassical behavior. In doing so they also aim to explain the observed gradient catastrophe for the underlying nonlinear elliptic partial differential equations, and to set forth a detailed, pointwise asymptotic description of the violent oscillations that emerge following the gradient catastrophe.

To achieve this, the authors have extended the reach of two powerful analytical techniques that have arisen through the asymptotic analysis of integrable systems: the Lax-Levermore-Venakides variational approach to singular limits in integrable systems, and Deift and Zhou's nonlinear Steepest-Descent/Stationary Phase method for the analysis of Riemann-Hilbert problems. In particular, they introduce a systematic procedure for handling certain Riemann-Hilbert problems with poles accumulating on curves in the plane. This book, which includes an appendix on the use of the Fredholm theory for Riemann-Hilbert problems in the Holder class, is intended for researchers and graduate students of applied mathematics and analysis, especially those with an interest in integrable systems, nonlinear waves, or complex analysis."