  The selection of topics in this text has formed the core of a one semester
course in applied mathematics at the Arctic University of Norway that has been
running continuously since the 1970s. The class has, during its existence,
drawn participants from both applied mathematics and physics, and also to some
extent from pure mathematics, analysis in particular. The material in these
lecture notes can be covered by one semester's worth of five lecture hours a
week. The work requirements for the students consists of seven obligatory
projects whose content are taken from exercises and computational projects
included in the text.
