The articles in this volume are an outgrowth of an international conference entitled Variational and Topological Methods in the Study of Nonlinear Phe- nomena, held in Pisa in January-February 2000. Under the framework of the research project Differential Equations and the Calculus of Variations, the conference was organized to celebrate the 60th birthday of Antonio Marino, one of the leaders of the research group and a significant contrib- utor to the mathematical activity in this area of nonlinear analysis. The volume highlights recent advances in the field of nonlinear functional analysis and its applications to nonlinear partial and ordinary differential equations, with particular emphasis on variational and topological meth- ods. A broad range of topics is covered, including: concentration phenomena in PDEs, variational methods with applications to PDEs and physics, pe- riodic solutions of ODEs, computational aspects in topological methods, and mathematical models in biology. Though well-differentiated, the topics covered are unified through a com- mon perspective and approach. Unique to the work are several chapters on computational aspects and applications to biology, not usually found with such basic studies on PDEs and ODEs. The volume is an excellent reference text for researchers and graduate students in the above mentioned fields. Contributors are M. Clapp, M.J. Esteban, P. Felmer, A. Ioffe, W. Marzan- towicz, M. Mrozek, M. Musso, R. Ortega, P. Pilarczyk, M. del Pino, E. Sere, E. Schwartzman, P. Sintzoff, R. Turner, and If. Willem.
