This book describes the state of the art in the field of modeling and solving numerically inverse problems of wave propagation and diffraction. It addresses mathematicians, physicists and engineers as well. Applications in such fields as acoustics, optics, and geophysics are emphasized. Of special interest are the contributions to two and three dimensional problems without reducing symmetries. Topics treated are the obstacle problem, scattering by classical media, and scattering by distributed media.

The normal business of physicists may be schematically thought of as predic ting the motions of particles on the basis of known forces, or the propagation of radiation on the basis of a known constitution of matter. The inverse problem is to conclude what the forces or constitutions are on the basis of the observed motion. A large part of our sensory contact with the world around us depends on an intuitive solution of such an inverse problem: We infer the shape, size, and surface texture of external objects from their scattering and absorption of light as detected by our eyes. When we use scattering experiments to learn the size or shape of particles, or the forces they exert upon each other, the nature of the problem is similar, if more refined. The kinematics, the equations of motion, are usually assumed to be known. It is the forces that are sought, and how they vary from point to point. As with so many other physical ideas, the first one we know of to have touched upon the kind of inverse problem discussed in this book was Lord Rayleigh (1877). In the course of describing the vibrations of strings of variable density he briefly discusses the possibility of inferring the density distribution from the frequencies of vibration. This passage may be regarded as a precursor of the mathematical study of the inverse spectral problem some seventy years later."

This volume contains the Proceedings of a meeting held at Montpellier from November 27th to December 1st 1989 and entitled "Inverse Problems Multicen tennials Meeting". It was held in honor of two major centennials: the foundation of Montpellier University in 1289 and the French Revolution of 1789. The meet ing was one of a series of annual meetings on interdisciplinary aspects of inverse problems organized in Montpellier since 1972 and known as "RCP 264". The meeting was sponsored by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (con tract GR 264) and by the Direction des Recherches et Etudes Techniques (contract 88 CO 283). The Proceedings are presented by chapters on different topics, the choice of topic often being arbitrary. The chapter titles are "Tomographic Inverse Problems", "Distributed Parameters Inverse Problems", "Spectral Inverse Problems (Exact Methods)", "Theoretical hnaging", "Wave Propagation and Scattering Problems (hnaging and Numerical Methods)", "Miscellaneous Problems", "Inverse Methods and Applications to Nonlinear Problems". In each chapter but the first, the papers have been sorted alphabetically according to author*. In the first chapter, a set of theoretical papers is presented first, then more applied ones. There are so many well-known and excellent lectures that I will not try to refer to them all here (the reader will be easily convinced by reading the Table of Contents). My comments at the conference are summarized by the short scientific introduction at the beginning of the volume.