The versatile soliton

"In this book, the concept of the soliton is traced from the beginning of the last century to modern times, with recent applications in biology, oceanography, solid state physics, electronics, elementary particle physics, and cosmology.". "The main concepts and results of theoretical physics related to solitons can be explained without using much mathematics. Indeed, on the descriptive and historical level, only some knowledge of high school physics and mathematics in needed. At a higher level, for understanding the elementary theory of oscillations and waves, the reader can intuit much from the numerous illustrations and perhaps skip the formulas presented. But to appreciate the deep connections in this book between apparently different and diverse phenomena and ideas, the reader must be able to follow elementary mathematical computations. Still more advanced mathematics is required for the appendices."--BOOK JACKET.