Approach your problems from the right end It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is and begin with the answers. Then one day, that they can't see the problem. perhaps you will find the final question. G. K. Chesterton. The Scandal of Father 'The Hermit Clad in Crane Feathers' in R. Brown 'The point of a Pin'. van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the "tree" of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces. And in addition to this there are such new emerging subdisciplines as "experimental mathematics," "CFD," "completely integrable systems," "chaos, synergetics and large-scale order," which are almost impossible to fit into the existing classification schemes. They draw upon widely different sections of mathematics.

This volume contains the proceedings of the First Ukrainian-French Romanian School "Algebraic and Geometric Methods in Mathematical Physics," held in Kaciveli, Crimea (Ukraine) from 1 September ti1114 September 1993. The School was organized by the generous support of the Ministry of Research and Space of France (MRE), the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (ANU), the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the State Committee for Science and Technologies of Ukraine (GKNT). Members of the International Scientific Committee were: J.-M. Bony (paris), A. Boutet de Monvel-Berthier (Paris, co-chairman), P. Cartier (paris), V. Drinfeld (Kharkov), V. Georgescu (Paris), J.L. Lebowitz (Rutgers), V. Marchenko (Kharkov, co-chairman), V.P. Maslov (Moscow), H. Mc-Kean (New-York), Yu. Mitropolsky (Kiev), G. Nenciu (Bucharest, co-chairman), S. Novikov (Moscow), G. Papanicolau (New-York), L. Pastur (Kharkov), J.-J. Sansuc (Paris). The School consisted of plenary lectures (morning sessions) and special sessions. The plenary lectures were intended to be accessible to all participants and plenary speakers were invited by the scientific organizing committee to give reviews of their own field of interest. The special sessions were devoted to a variety of more concrete and technical questions in the respective fields. According to the program the plenary lectures included in the volume are grouped in three chapters. The fourth chapter contains short communications."

The idea of devoting a complete book to this topic was born at one of the Workshops on Nonlinear and Turbulent Processes in Physics taking place reg ularly in Kiev. With the exception of E. D. Siggia and N. Ercolani, all authors of this volume were participants at the third of these workshops. All of them were acquainted with each other and with each other's work. Yet it seemed to be somewhat of a discovery that all of them were and are trying to understand the same problem - the problem of integrability of dynamical systems, primarily Hamiltonian ones with an infinite number of degrees of freedom. No doubt that they (or to be more exact, we) were led to this by the logical process of scientific evolution which often leads to independent, almost simultaneous discoveries. Integrable, or, more accurately, exactly solvable equations are essential to theoretical and mathematical physics. One could say that they constitute the "mathematical nucleus" of theoretical physics whose goal is to describe real clas sical or quantum systems. For example, the kinetic gas theory may be considered to be a theory of a system which is trivially integrable: the system of classical noninteracting particles. One of the main tasks of quantum electrodynamics is the development of a theory of an integrable perturbed quantum system, namely, noninteracting electromagnetic and electron-positron fields."

This volume contains the proceedings of the First Ukrainian-French Romanian School "Algebraic and Geometric Methods in Mathematical Physics," held in Kaciveli, Crimea (Ukraine) from 1 September ti1114 September 1993. The School was organized by the generous support of the Ministry of Research and Space of France (MRE), the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (ANU), the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the State Committee for Science and Technologies of Ukraine (GKNT). Members of the International Scientific Committee were: J.-M. Bony (paris), A. Boutet de Monvel-Berthier (Paris, co-chairman), P. Cartier (paris), V. Drinfeld (Kharkov), V. Georgescu (Paris), J.L. Lebowitz (Rutgers), V. Marchenko (Kharkov, co-chairman), V.P. Maslov (Moscow), H. Mc-Kean (New-York), Yu. Mitropolsky (Kiev), G. Nenciu (Bucharest, co-chairman), S. Novikov (Moscow), G. Papanicolau (New-York), L. Pastur (Kharkov), J.-J. Sansuc (Paris). The School consisted of plenary lectures (morning sessions) and special sessions. The plenary lectures were intended to be accessible to all participants and plenary speakers were invited by the scientific organizing committee to give reviews of their own field of interest. The special sessions were devoted to a variety of more concrete and technical questions in the respective fields. According to the program the plenary lectures included in the volume are grouped in three chapters. The fourth chapter contains short communications."

Approach your problems from the right end It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is and begin with the answers. Then one day, that they can't see the problem. perhaps you will find the final question. G. K. Chesterton. The Scandal of Father 'The Hermit Clad in Crane Feathers' in R. Brown 'The point of a Pin'. van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the "tree" of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces. And in addition to this there are such new emerging subdisciplines as "experimental mathematics," "CFD," "completely integrable systems," "chaos, synergetics and large-scale order," which are almost impossible to fit into the existing classification schemes. They draw upon widely different sections of mathematics.

The development of many important directions of mathematics and physics owes a major debt to the concepts and methods which evolved during the investigation of such simple objects as the Sturm-Liouville equation 2 2 y" ] q(x)y = zy and the allied Sturm-Liouville operator L = - d /dx + q(x) (lately Land q(x) are often termed the one-dimensional Schroedinger operator and the potential). These provided a constant source of new ideas and problems in the spectral theory of operators and kindred areas of analysis. This sourse goes back to the first studies of D. Bernoulli and L. Euler on the solution of the equation describing the vibrations of astring, and still remains productive after more than two hundred years. This is confirmed by the recent discovery, made by C. Gardner, J. Green, M. Kruskal, and R. Miura [6J, of an unexpected connection between the spectral theory of Sturm-Liouville operators and certain nonlinear partial differential evolution equations. The methods used (and often invented) during the study of the Sturm-Liouville equation have been constantly enriched. In the 40's a new investigation tool joined the arsenal - that of transformation operators.