The Versatile Soliton

If you have not already heard about solitons, you will sooner or later
encounter them.
The soliton, a solitary wave impulse preserving its shape and
strikingly similar to a particle, is one of the most fascinating and
beautiful phenomena in the physics of nonlinear waves. In this
engaging 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 is 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.