This work was initiated in the summer of 1985 while all of the authors
were at the Center of Nonlinear Studies of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory; it was then continued and polished while the authors were at
Indiana Univer- sity, at the University of Paris-Sud (Orsay), and again
at Los Alamos in 1986 and 1987. Our aim was to present a direct
geometric approach in the theory of inertial manifolds (global analogs
of the unstable-center manifolds) for dissipative partial differential
equations. This approach, based on Cauchy integral mani- folds for which
the solutions of the partial differential equations are the generating
characteristic curves, has the advantage that it provides a sound basis
for numerical Galerkin schemes obtained by approximating the inertial
manifold. The work is self-contained and the prerequisites are at the
level of a graduate student. The theoretical part of the work is
developed in Chapters 2-14, while in Chapters 15-19 we apply the theory
to several remarkable partial differ- ential equations.