title: Memories of Hirota's method: application to the reduced Maxwell-Bloch system in the early 1970s.
abstract: Who remembers 'Hirota's method'? In the early days of solitons, although the Korteweg-de Vries equation had been solved by the 'inverse scattering method' most solutions to integrable non-linear equations were found by simpler more direct methods. Outstanding among these was a method due mainly to Hirota, which involved casting the equation into a 'bilinear form' and then applying intelligent guesswork. In this paper, I shall take a journey down memory lane, looking again at this method.
authors.affiliation: University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. philip.caudrey@ntlworld.com
authors.forename: P J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Caudrey