The 60th birthday of Peter Lax was celebrated at Berkeley by a conference entitled Wave Motion: theory, application and computation held at the mathematical Sciences Research Institute, June 9-12, 1986. Peter Lax has made profound and essential contributions to the topics described by the title of the conference, and has also contributed in important ways to many other mathematical subjects, and as a result this conference volume dedicated to him includes research work on a variety of topics, not all clearly related to its title.

Lattice Vortex Models and Turbulence Theory.- The Curve Shortening Flow.- Lax's Construction of Parametrices of Fundamental Solutions of Strongly Hyperbolic Operators, Its Prehistory and Posthistory.- The Bukiet-Jones Theory of Weak Detonation Waves in Curvilinear Geometry.- Three-Dimensional Fluid Dynamics in a Two-Dimensional Amount of Central Memory.- On the Nonlinearity of Modern Shock-Capturing Schemes.- High Frequency Semilinear Oscillations.- Exact Controllability and Singular Perturbations.- Transonic Flow and Compensated Compactness.- Scattering Theory for the Wave Equation on a Hyperbolic Manifold.- Determinants of Laplacians on Surfaces.- The Small Dispersion Limit of the Korteweg-de Vries Equation.