No label defined (Q4514910)

This paper gives a comprehensive review of nonlinear physics with special emphasis on integrability and chaos. The paper begins with a nice historical account starting with Scott-Russel's discovery of a solitary wave. Sophia Kovalevskaya's work on integrability of dynamical systems, Poincaré's work on sensitive dependence on initial conditions, van der Pol's observations of chaotic oscillations in electrical circuits, the famous Fermi-Pasta-Ulam experiments, the Zabusky-Kruskal discovery of solitons, Lorenz's path breaking studies are all catalogued. The next part reviews Hirota's bilinearization method, Bäcklund transformations, Painlevé property and applications of solitons in magnetism, nonlinear optics, liquid crystals and particle physics. A brief review of chaos in dissipative and conservative dynamical systems is also included. Finally, the author discusses in some detail various open problems in integrable and nonintegrable systems. Possible avenues of investigation in applied areas like micromagnetics and magnetoelectronics, optical soliton based communication are also explored. Thus the paper has a good mix of history, modern techniques and future possibilities. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0927.00052].