ABSTRACT

The purpose of this short note is to do exactly what the title says: to provide the reader who is uninformed about inverse scattering theory with a view of what the field is about and a few of the recent advances that have been made. In order to do this in a few pages we obviously can only focus on a special, albeit representative, problem, and this choice has of course been strongly influenced by our own research interests. Hence, far from being encyclopaedic, our presentation will be very specific. Nevertheless, by learning about this specific problem, our hope is that the reader will get a glimpse of the fascination of inverse scattering theory. For a detailed and comprehensive presentation of our view of the field of inverse scattering, we refer the reader to our monograph [1].