The papers in this volume are an outgrowth of the lectures and informal
discussions that took place during the workshop on "The Geometry of
Hamiltonian Systems" which was held at MSRl from June 5 to 16, 1989. It
was, in some sense, the last major event of the year-long program on
Symplectic Geometry and Mechanics. The emphasis of all the talks was on
Hamiltonian dynamics and its relationship to several aspects of
symplectic geometry and topology, mechanics, and dynamical systems in
general. The organizers of the conference were R. Devaney (co-chairman),
H. Flaschka (co-chairman), K. Meyer, and T. Ratiu. The entire meeting
was built around two mini-courses of five lectures each and a series of
two expository lectures. The first of the mini-courses was given by A.
T. Fomenko, who presented the work of his group at Moscow University on
the classification of integrable systems. The second mini- course was
given by J. Marsden of UC Berkeley, who spoke about several applications
of symplectic and Poisson reduction to problems in stability, normal
forms, and symmetric Hamiltonian bifurcation theory. Finally, the two
expository talks were given by A. Fathi of the University of Florida who
concentrated on the links between symplectic geometry, dynamical
systems, and Teichmiiller theory.