Aku berjalan di tengah udara malam yang dingini daerah Barbés di utara Paris, tidak jauh dari Montmartre. Tak terasa, lamunan dan emosiku membuatku berjalan terlalu jauh menuju taman yang sepi dan gelap. Saat kusadari aku berada di tempat yang gelap dan sunyi aku mulai merasa khawatir. Seolah-olah langkah kakiku diawasi oleh seseorang. Lalu aku memberanikan diri untuk duduk di sebuah bangku taman. Lampu taman yang teman dan semilir angin dingin membuat bulu romaku berdiri. Kemudian tiba-tiba muncul seorang pria negro berbadan tinggi besar menghampiriku.

The papers in this collection were written primarily by members of the St. Petersburg seminar in mathematical physics. The seminar, now run by O. A. Ladyzhenskaya, was initiated in 1947 by V. I. Smirnov, to whose memory this volume is dedicated. The papers in the collection are devoted mainly to wave propagation processes, scattering theory, integrability of nonlinear equations, and related problems of spectral theory of differential and integral operators. The book is of interest to mathematicians working in mathematical physics and differential equations, as well as to physicists studying various wave propagation processes.