  These notes are devoted to the problem of finite-dimensional reduction for
parabolic PDEs. We give a detailed exposition of the classical theory of
inertial manifolds as well as various attempts to generalize it based on the
so-called Man\'e projection theorems. The recent counterexamples which show
that the underlying dynamics may be in a sense infinite-dimensional if the
spectral gap condition is violated as well as the discussion on the most
important open problems are also included.
