Bilinear integrable systems : From classical to quantum, continuous to discrete ; Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Bilinear Integrable Systems: From Classical to Quantum, Continuous to Discrete St. Petersburg, Russia, 15-19 September 2002

Trained as a physicistin his home university Kyushu University, Professor Hirota earned his PhD in’61 at Northwestern University with Professor Siegert in the field of “QuantumStatistical mechanics”. He wrote a widely appreciated Doctoral dissertation on“Functional Integral representation of the grand partition function”. As a youngresearcher, he entered the RCA Company in Tokyo to do research on semi-conductor plasmas. Professor Hirota was led to model the Toda lattice as a non-linear networkof ladder-type LC circuits. The self-dual case led to equations very reminiscentof the Sine-Gordon equation, with much the same features (existence of onesoliton, soliton-soliton interaction, etc)