This book is the outcome of a conference held at the Centro De Giorgi of the Scuola Normale of Pisa in September 2012. The aim of the conference was to discuss recent results on nonlinear partial differential equations, and more specifically geometric evolutions and reaction-diffusion equations. Particular attention was paid to self-similar solutions, such as solitons and travelling waves, asymptotic behaviour, formation of singularities and qualitative properties of solutions. These problems arise in many models from Physics, Biology, Image Processing and Applied Mathematics in general, and have attracted a lot of attention in recent years.