Summary

Exactly 100 years ago, in 1895, G. de Vries, under the supervision of D.J. Korteweg, defended his thesis on what is now known as the Korteweg-de Vries Equation. They published a joint paper in 1895 in the Philosophical Magazine, entitled On the change of form of long waves advancing in a rectangular canal, and on a new type of long stationary wave. In the 1960s research on this and related equations exploded. There are now some 3100 papers in mathematics and physics that contain a mention of the phrase Korteweg-de Vries equation in their title or abstract, and there are thousands more in other areas, such as biology, chemistry, electronics, geology, oceanology, meteorology, and so forth. And, of course, the KdV equation is only one of what are now called (Liouville) completely integrable systems. The KdV and its relatives continually turn up in situations when one wishes to incorporate nonlinear and dispersive effects into wave-type phenomena.