This book is based on research that, to a large extent, started around 1990, when a research project on fluid flow in stochastic reservoirs was initiated by a group including some of us with the support of VISTA, a research coopera tion between the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and Den norske stats oljeselskap A.S. (Statoil). The purpose of the project was to use stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) to describe the flow of fluid in a medium where some of the parameters, e.g., the permeability, were stochastic or "noisy". We soon realized that the theory of SPDEs at the time was insufficient to handle such equations. Therefore it became our aim to develop a new mathematically rigorous theory that satisfied the following conditions. 1) The theory should be physically meaningful and realistic, and the corre sponding solutions should make sense physically and should be useful in applications. 2) The theory should be general enough to handle many of the interesting SPDEs that occur in reservoir theory and related areas. 3) The theory should be strong and efficient enough to allow us to solve th,~se SPDEs explicitly, or at least provide algorithms or approximations for the solutions.

The Handbook of Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations is the latest in a series of acclaimed handbooks by these authors and presents exact solutions of more than 1600 nonlinear equations encountered in science and engineering--many more than any other book available. The equations include those of parabolic, hyperbolic, elliptic and other types, and the authors pay special attention to equations of general form that involve arbitrary functions. A supplement at the end of the book discusses the classical and new methods for constructing exact solutions to nonlinear equations. To accommodate different mathematical backgrounds, the authors avoid wherever possible the use of special terminology, outline some of the methods in a schematic, simplified manner, and arrange the equations in increasing order of complexity. Highlights of the Handbook: