Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a survey of our book by placing what we have to say in a historical context. We obviously cannot give a complete account of inverse scattering theory in a book of only a few hundred pages, particularly since before discussing the inverse problem we have to give the rudiments of the theory of the direct problem. Hence, instead of attempting the impossible, we have chosen to present inverse scattering theory from the perspective of our own interests and research program. This inevitably means that certain areas of scattering theory are either ignored or given only cursory attention. In view of this fact, and in fairness to the reader, we have therefore decided to provide a few words at the beginning of our book to tell the reader what we are going to do, as well as what we are not going to do, in the forthcoming chapters.